2025-01-28T16:08:03.640Z

OpenAI’s Sam Altman responds

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has now publicly commented on DeepSeek for the first time, stating on X (formerly Twitter) that the AI model is “impressive” – and I can’t help but hear that in the voice of Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho business card scene.

But he was also typically bullish about OpenAI’s response, stating that “we will obviously deliver much better models” and that it’s “legit invigorating to have a new competitor”. Altman also doesn’t think the news changes the picture in terms of chips, stating that “more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission”.

The markets don’t seem to agree, with the chip-making giant Nvidia suffering the biggest one-day market value dive in US history yesterday.

2025-01-28T15:39:56.027Z

A quick DeepSeek refresher

A bit confused about DeepSeek? Here’s a quick primer. The free AI chatbot was actually released on January 20, but has exploded in popularity over the past few days as tech fans realized its significance. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen noted on X (formerly Twitter), “Deepseek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment”.

The app is currently top of the free charts on Apple’s App Store and Play Store in the US and many other countries, despite being made in China – which was the subject of a trade ban on advanced chips from the likes of Nvidia.

Ironically, it’s those trade restrictions that appear to have sparked the ingenuity behind of DeepSeek, which was created using a tiny amount of the enormous compute power that’s behind today’s major AI models.

Benchmark tests show that it can perform tasks like answering questions and generating code as well as the current top AI models around. However, you may have trouble creating a DeepSeek account – it was forced to pause sign-ups following a major cyber-attack.