OpenAI Promises “much Better” AI Models Than DeepSeek’s

DeepSeek has arrived as a bang to the artificial intelligence ​​segment. Its high performance at a fraction of the price of other models caused a sharp crash in the stocks of companies like NVIDIA, which lost up to $600 billion in market capitalization in just a few hours. Although DeepSeek’s capabilities are impressive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman remains stoic about the situation.

DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek V3 are the latest AI models from the Chinese company. R1 is a direct rival to ChatGPT 4o, specializing in “reasoning” for complex problems. On the other hand, V3 is the general-purpose model behind the DeepSeek chatbot, available as an app for Android and iOS.

DeepSeek R1 is “impressive,” but OpenAI will launch “much better models,” Sam Altman claims

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, praised DeepSeek R1 as an “impressive” model in a post on X/Twitter. He added that it is “legit invigorating to have a new competitor” in the AI ​​segment. However, Altman also said that his company “will obviously deliver much better models.”

While OpenAI is undoubtedly capable of delivering a more powerful model in the near future, the real question is: at what price? DeepSeek’s impact on the market is mainly due to its low development costs. The Chinese firm claims that training DeepSeek models costs just $6 million, a tiny fraction of what other big players in the segment typically spend. Plus, official benchmarks show DeepSeek V3 is superior to other popular AI models in multiple parameters.

DeepSeek achieved this using thousands of older NVIDIA H800 AI chips. Support from the Chinese government and the open, collaborative approach of the Chinese AI industry have also helped. In fact, DeepSeek’s AI models are open source, so anyone can build on them or audit the code.

Altman is happy with the impact of competition

That said, Altman seems comfortable walking on muddy ground. He said that “more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission” and that “the world is going to want to use a LOT of AI, and really be quite amazed by the next-gen models coming.” So, he seems to be taking the situation as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience.

On the other hand, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, referred to the arrival of DeepSeek as a “wake-up call” for US tech giants. Previously, big names in the tech industry—including Sam Altman himself—warned about China’s rapid growth in terms of artificial intelligence development. However, it seems that Beijing was a bit further ahead than they thought. In turn, the latest developments call into question the effectiveness of US trade restrictions on China.

However, there are still things to be clarified regarding DeepSeek. Some experts have warned about potential security and privacy risks due to the company’s shady data handling policies. There are also some vulnerabilities discovered in the source code.