OpenAI Chief Praises DeepSeek's R1 Model, Elon Musk Takes A Dig: Here's What Industry Leaders Have To Say

Elon Musk joked about DeepSeek's data storing policy and called it 'DeeperSeek'.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman praised the performance and pricing of DeepSeek's R1 model.

Source : X/@jdubz069, @elonmuskADO

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepSeek has sent shockwaves in the tech industry. It has entered the AI market to compete with the likes of giants like OpenAI. Usually, big tech companies refrain from directly engaging in talking about their rivals on public platforms. However, OpenAI chief Sam Altman has reacted to DeepSeek now. Altman in a post on X wrote, "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."

He added, "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."

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.

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 28, 2025

X owner Elon Musk has also reacted to Deepseek but his comments went in a different direction.

Elon Musk Reacts

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said, "DeepSeek has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that they can't talk about because of the US export controls that are in place." Musk while reacting to this said, "Obviously."

Obviously

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 27, 2025

A user posted, "Love the Deepseek app, using it to organize all my finances and passwords. They make it so easy." Since DeepSeek stores data in China, Musk while taking a dig at the company wrote, "DeeperSeek."

DeeperSeek 😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 27, 2025

The CEO of Perplexity AI said, "There’s a lot of misconception that China “just cloned” the outputs of openai. This is far from true and reflects incomplete understanding of how these models are trained in the first place. DeepSeek R1 has figured out RL finetuning. They wrote a whole paper on this topic called DeepSeek R1 Zero, where no SFT was used. And then combined it with some SFT to add domain knowledge with good rejection sampling (aka filtering). The main reason it’s so good is it learned reasoning from scratch rather than imitating other humans or models."

There’s a lot of misconception that China “just cloned” the outputs of openai. This is far from true and reflects incomplete understanding of how these models are trained in the first place. DeepSeek R1 has figured out RL finetuning. They wrote a whole paper on this topic called…

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 28, 2025

Marc Andreessen, a prominent tech investor, called DeepSeek's breakthrough "AI's Sputnik moment."