OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday (Jan 27) called Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 AI model “impressive”, but emphasised that OpenAI believes greater computing power was key to their own success.
DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model, grabbed global attention last month when it stated in a paper that training its DeepSeek-V3 model required less than US$6 million in computing power using the lower-capability Nvidia H800 chips.
DeepSeek-R1, launched last week, is 20 to 50 times more affordable to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek’s official WeChat account.
“DeepSeek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” Altman said on X.
“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.”
