OpenAI’s Sam Altman praises DeepSeek as ‘an impressive model’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly applauded competitor DeepSeek’s R1 model in a recent social media post.

Taking to X on January 28, Altman praised the Chinese startup’s large language model, labelling it “an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price.” That’s in reference to DeepSeek reportedly being built and trained for less than $6 million, a trifle compared to the billions tech giants like OpenAI have been spending.

deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price.

we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 28, 2025

Altman still backed his own company’s product, ChatGPT, going on to say: “We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases.

“But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission. The world is going to want to use a LOT of AI, and really be quite amazed by the next-gen models coming.”

Indeed, there’s surely space for multiple AI companies around the world – and if DeepSeek can truly deliver a realistic competitor for far fewer resources, it breaks down the assumption that better AI requires huge amounts of computing power.

That’s good news for both tech budgets and the environment, with huge data centers already sucking up huge amounts of energy.

Nonetheless, Altman himself seemed to push back on the notion that future AI advances will be any less expensive to produce, particularly with his comment that the OpenAI team believes “more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission.”

In terms of financial impact away from social media posts, shares of OpenAI’s partner SoftBank Group Corp. faced losses following the success of DeepSeek, falling by 4.7% on Tuesday morning in Tokyo.

Featured image: Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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