OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s first comment on rival DeepSeek: Impressive for its price

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 artificial intelligence model as “impressive,” but emphasized that the key to OpenAI’s success lies in greater processing power. DeepSeek garnered attention by stating that it used lower-capacity Nvidia H800 chips to train its V3 model, spending less than $6 million in processing power.

The recently launched DeepSeek-R1 reportedly has a usage cost that is 20 to 50 times cheaper than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task.

On the X platform, Sam Altman commented, “DeepSeek’s R1 model is particularly impressive in terms of what they offer for its price.”

He added, “However, we are excited to continue working on our research roadmap, and we believe that we need more processing power than ever to achieve our mission.”