OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a dig at DeepSeek’s now-disputed claim of training its AI tool at a low cost of just $6 million in an interview with Hindustan Times. Altman spoke to Hindustan Times on Wednesday during his ongoing trip to India and discussed a range of issues central to artificial intelligence, including the rise of rival DeepSeek.
“What was your first response when the news of the Chinese model, DeepSeek, came out? At least the headline was that they'd managed to train their model at a much lower cost, although it turned out later that that wasn't really the case,” he was asked.
Altman replied with a jibe at his company’s Chinese competitor.
“I was extremely sceptical of the cost number. It was like, there are some zeros missing. But, yeah, it's a good model, and we'll need to make better models, which we will do,” he responded.
Some context
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley by claiming that it trained its advanced AI model, R1, with just $6 million and 2,048 GPUs, making it highly cost-effective compared to models like OpenAI's o1.
However, a report from SemiAnalysis challenged this claim, revealing that DeepSeek actually spent up to $1.6 billion on hardware and has a fleet of 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. While the company did acknowledge that its reported cost only covered "official training" and not prior research or experiments, the new findings suggest that DeepSeek's AI development was far more expensive than initially presented.
{{/usCountry}}However, a report from SemiAnalysis challenged this claim, revealing that DeepSeek actually spent up to $1.6 billion on hardware and has a fleet of 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. While the company did acknowledge that its reported cost only covered "official training" and not prior research or experiments, the new findings suggest that DeepSeek's AI development was far more expensive than initially presented.
{{/usCountry}}While DeepSeek’s cost-effectiveness remains debatable, its rapid advancements in AI have positioned it as a strong competitor in the industry.