Sam Altman says DeepSeek's R1 is an “impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price” and OpenAI “will pull up some releases”

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman welcomed the debut of DeepSeek's R1 model in a post on X late on Monday.

Bloomberg 2025-01-28 Vlad Savov

Context & Ripple Effects

DeepSeek’s R1 had just been framed as a challenge built on low-cost delivery, open source, and reinforcement-learning-led development in coverage of its cost-efficient approach. Altman’s response makes price-performance—not just top-line model capability—the immediate competitive benchmark.

The significance is that OpenAI is publicly acknowledging a rival’s efficiency advantage while signaling a faster product cadence. That turns R1 from a technical comparison into a timing and release-strategy pressure point for the market leader.

First-order effects

OpenAI signals it may accelerate planned releases, raising expectations among its users, developers, and partners for nearer-term model or product updates.
DeepSeek gains validation from a leading competitor’s emphasis on R1’s delivered value at its price point, strengthening attention to its model as an alternative.

Second-order effects

Frontier-model providers face added pressure to show not only benchmark gains but also lower-cost useful output, reinforcing the importance of DeepSeek’s efficiency-focused development model.
Enterprise buyers and developers gain more leverage to compare model options on cost and capability, potentially making release timing and accessible pricing more consequential in vendor selection.

Third-order effects

If rivals continue to match capable models at lower cost, the model race could shift from a narrow frontier-performance contest toward competition on cost per useful task, release velocity, and distribution.
OpenAI’s stated willingness to pull forward releases suggests that competitive cycles may shorten; whether that produces sustained price pressure depends on whether low-cost approaches remain reproducible at scale.

The trend: AI model competition is broadening from who has the strongest model to who can deliver capable models fastest and at the most compelling cost.

Discussion

@sfpodge Patrick M. on bluesky
Altman taking a page from one of his corporate bankers. “pull up some releases” is Microsoft speak for — let's flood the market with crappy code. we can fix the bugs with subsequent updates. [embedded post]
@tomgara Tom Gara on threads
The $6m figure was literally just the cost of the GPU hours used in training. It's like seeing that there's $4,000 worth of steel in a Camry and being like, you can now compete with Toyota for less than $5,000
@sama Sam Altman on x
deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.
@erikvoorhees Erik Voorhees on x
Funny to watch everyone freaking out about their DeepSeek data going to Chinese gov Y'all know all your ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/xAI data goes to US gov right?
@sama Sam Altman on x
look forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond.
@alanmcole Alan Cole on x
AI people are always like “you're just skeptical about AI completing this task because you tested e3-Bulbasaur-mini. If you tested it on o5-Witherspoon-Bumblecat, you'd probably get a better result. Normies are so behind!”
@danhind Dan Hind on x
The Chinese have released a LLM that makes a mockery of the UK's plan to build big data centres that use all our fresh water and energy, less than 2 weeks after Starmer warbled on about us becoming an AI superpower. While it's very funny, it also points to something important ...
@karmedge Robert Lukoszko on x
I spent 20k$, got approved O1 visa petition, got into YCombinator and still can not enter US Officer in Embassy just refused my Visa. I worked in AI since 2017; 16 y.o. Cc @elonmusk, @realDonaldTrump @JDVance [image]
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
The main two implications of DeepSeek are going to be (1) an acceleration of AI model development until they hit a wall and (2) increased likelihood that there is no wall in the near future
@justinebateman Justine Bateman on x
Blah, blah, blah, give-me-all-the-money-in-the- world, blah, blah, blah.
@hosseeb Haseeb on x
There are ~200 co-authors on the DeepSeek R1 paper. The U.S. should offer each of them immediate citizenship and $20M in cash to move here.
@vusithembekwayo @vusithembekwayo on x
In six months, mainstream media will label DeepSeek as harmful to humanity and a threat to internet data privacy, calling for severe consequences. I'm willing to bet.
@kortizart Karla Ortiz on x
I swear if this DeepSeek thing turns into “this is why we need more of ppl's work and data for free so we can compete with CHINA” BS, instead of what it needs to be, a reveal of how pointless and inept the tech and its peddlers are and have always been, i'm gonna be so pissed.
@evgenymorozov Evgeny Morozov on x
There could hardly be a clearer sign that we are living in techno-capitalism than DeepSeek's cost challenge to Silicon Valley. Yet, those who see techno-feudalism everywhere will surely twist its meaning. In its non-falsifiability, techno-feudalism borders on religion.
@orphiccapital @orphiccapital on x
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@kenklippenstein Ken Klippenstein on x
how long until deepseek becomes a National Security Threat
@iscienceluvr Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. on x
Part of the reason the public is shocked is that most of them have only played with ChatGPT 4o (in the free plan) so when they try a reasoning model like R1 they think China has made this incredible leap in abilities over Americans. Public doesn't know about o1, o3, Claude, etc.
@john_stepek John Stepek on x
See I'm not sure about this Jevon's Paradox theory because I heard about DeepSeek last Thursday and I still can't come up with a personal use case for AI. Take that, permabulls
@gergelyorosz Gergely Orosz on x
Remember when an incumbent tech company that had all the resources, and every advantage stacked against them... got blindsided by this tiny team that beat them at their own game? Many examples, eg: Yahoo -> Google; MySpace -> Facebook; Google -> OpenAI Now: OpenAI -> DeepSeek
@peterdiamandis Peter H. Diamandis on x
Netflix ate Blockbuster. Amazon crushed retail. Uber reinvented transport. And now... a tiny open-source AI team called DeepSeek is shaking OpenAI, NVIDIA, and the entire AI world to its core. But this isn't just about AI. This is the beginning of a revolution across [image]
@macaesbruno Bruno Maçães on x
If China freely released DeepSeek for the whole world to use imagine what they have not released (I am naturally assuming Chinese authorities are involved in these decisions)
@tphuang @tphuang on x
Perplexity has now integrated R1 reasoning into their deep web searches now. Note, you can host R1 or any other open src models outside of China & make money off that. You can also deploy uncensored R1. that's what MIT license allows! The arguments against using DeepSeek models
@blakestonks Blake on x
DeepSeek's R1 has already matched the models of OpenAI at a tenth of the cost & time. As more competition grows within “AI” this will only cause profitability & margins to shrink. Billions getting poured down the drain.
@miles_brundage Miles Brundage on x
Wonder what Moo Deng thinks about DeepSeek
@kaiserkuo Kaiser Kuo on x
1/ Why does the U.S. seem to be caught off guard so often by what China or Chinese companies accomplish? Here's an off-the-top-of-my head thread unpacking some reasons—structural, cultural, and epistemological—for this recurring phenomenon.
@konradryczko Konrad Ryczko on x
“AI race sputnik moment”
@john_stepek John Stepek on x
So if AI is cheap now, does that mean it becomes a software rather than a hardware play? The picks'n'shovels thesis suddenly looks a bit outdated? I'd ask DeepSeek but I prefer my responses with the occasional insult thrown in
@onlyfanons Raya on x
also it's legit invigorating [image]
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
Another OpenAI safety researcher has quit: “Honestly I am pretty terrified.” [image]
@oldmankotaro Kotaro on x
hmmm [image]
@stevehouf Steve Hou on x
After using DeepSeek for the past few weeks, esp since the app came out fairly intensely, I am increasingly sensing that while DeepSeek is impressive and its UI of optionally directly displaying “machine thought process” is novel and curious, it's going to wear off. I don't
@classicshelb Shelby on x
Coke doesn't have to comment when Pepsi does something
@saboo_shubham_ Shubham Saboo on x
After DeepSeek and Kimi, there's new agentic multimodal model from china that almost beats Claude Sonnet 3.5, Gemini-2 Flash & GPT-4o. Qwen 2.5 VL lets you create $200/month OpenAI Operator like agent for Computer and mobile phones. And it's 100% Opensource. Let that sink in. [vi…
@litcapital @litcapital on x
“OpenAI huh? $500B? Gimme 2 weeks and $5 million and I'll clone it asap” - DeepSeek's CTO [image]
@mave99a Robert Mao on x
If OpenAI had remained as open as it was initially intended, the industry might not have rushed to compete by purchasing billions of GPUs. Open-source AI could have evolved more collaboratively and steadily, potentially leading to even better advancements by now.
@distributionat Thomas on x
why has deepseek conquered my timeline for several days? not sure, but some hypotheses - * the model is very good * anybody can talk to the model and tell that it's very good. unlike sonnet 3.5, which requires you to already know how to talk to models or talk to it a lot. * it's
@robertmsterling Robert Sterling on x
Might be a dumb question, but can't OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies just incorporate the best parts of DeepSeek's source code into their code, then use the massive GPU clusters at their disposal to train models even more powerful than DeepSeek? Am I missing something?
@techbrospod @techbrospod on x
Today is the perfect day to call a VC, ask for their take on DeepSeek, wait until they finish talking, then sigh, say “you are truly lost” and hang up.
@natemcgrady Nate on x
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@aravsrinivas Aravind Srinivas on x
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
@parikpatelcfa @parikpatelcfa on x
OpenAI, a non-profit: “hi we are a $150Bn company pls call our API to receive tokens and no you can't have the weights” DeepSeek, literally a hedge fund: “lol here are the weights and code bro have fun”
@sama Sam Altman on x
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.
@patrickmoorhead Patrick Moorhead on x
Like I said yesterday, and @sama reiterates, there is zero question on the need for the highest performing AI infrastructure on the path to AGI. Even if you don't believe this, you then have to believe the boon in inference is coming as reasoning just got more affordable which
@ojblanchard1 Olivier Blanchard on x
DeepSeek and what happened yesterday: Probably the largest positive tfp shock in the history of the world.
@divestech Dan Ives on x
We expect more innovation in AI/LLM model costs to come down..However, saying DeepSeek was built for $6 million with no Nvidia next generation hardware is likely a fictional story that is at the heart of this debate and drove a massive tech-sell off. Street reaction got in wrong
@signulll @signulll on x
deepseek should've been called chatccp.
@stevenheidel Steven Heidel on x
copenai
@_timbarker Tim Barker on x
[image]
@parikpatelcfa @parikpatelcfa on x
“We will obviously deliver much better models” [image]
@marvinvonhagen Marvin von Hagen on x
zero historical mentions of “sonnet” whatsoever on @sama's twitter. china is coming
@armankhon Arman on x
Unlike OpenAI, DeepSeek is open AI.
@teroterotero Tero Kuittinen on x
He is smooth... the chirpy, faintly dismissive tone is just right. No notes.
@parismarx Paris Marx on x
altman really wants you to believe deepseek changes absolutely nothing
@fieroty @fieroty on x
@sama: “It's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models” [video]
@drewpavlou Drew Pavlou on x
If Chinese laws prohibit DeepSeek from revealing Xi Jinping's birthday (June 15, 1953) why do you expect them to tell us the truth about their development model and costings. Can you imagine US laws prohibiting Grok or ChatGPT mentioning Trump's birthday? It's just mental. [image…
@heshiebee Brody on x
DeepSeek overtaking the market as if OpenAi never existed [video]
@jordihays Jordi Hays on x
It's only open source AI if it's from the Mistral region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling spyware.
@perplexity_ai @perplexity_ai on x
DeepSeek R1 is now available on Perplexity to support deep web research. This is hosted exclusively in US & EU data centers - your data never leaves Western servers. Toggle on Pro Search to try it out.
@jathansadowski Jathan Sadowski on x
It's objectively funny to see DeepSeek — an open source, high performing AI model trained by a Chinese startup for less than $6 million — wipe $1 trillion off tech stocks only days after Trump, OpenAI, and SoftBank announce their $500 billion Stargate boondoggle.
@bgurley Bill Gurley on x
Everyone freaking out about DeepSeek being a Chinese company collecting your data (including @BillAckman) don't understand OpenSource. @huggingface says it's already been respun 500+ times. You can run it today on @perplexity_ai (see below).
@groqinc @groqinc on x
👀 Powered by DeepSeek on Groq!
@deedydas Deedy on x
I still can't get over that DeepSeek did with 200 employees what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon haven't been able to do with 500,000+ employees. There is no upper bound on what small focused teams can achieve.
@kantrowitz Alex Kantrowitz on x
OpenAI: We want to drop the cost of intelligence to zero DeepSeek: Drops cost of intelligence close to zero Market: Panic
@ptetlock Philip E. Tetlock on x
Insightful counterfactual thought experiment below: Would we have same zero-sum-game reaction to Deepseek news if the breakthrough had come from an low-profile lab in USA, not China?
@0xish Ish on x
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@thegasstovee @thegasstovee on x
@sama you got deepseeked
@mikeisaac Rat King on x
i dont care who “wins or loses” in this Deepseek vs OpenAI fight but the argument that it is unfair DS trained off of american models is pretty funny “When we train our models off the entire open and closed internet IP it is cool. But that's because you should be America first”
@liangwenfeng_ Liang Wenfeng on x
good luck
@jachiam0 Joshua Achiam on x
Realized there is something I did not say today during the DeepSeek discourse that should have been my first thought, and I am chagrined that it took me so long. Congratulations to the DeepSeek team. You made something people love. You helped push the frontier of science.
@rahll Reid Southen on x
The really interesting thing about DeepSeek and other AI companies training on synthetic data from ChatGPT outputs is that OpenAI can't even really go after them without damaging their own “fair use” defense in the copyright suits against them.
@jenzhuscott Jen Zhu on x
People trashing DeepSeek being a Chinese co collects your data are only publicly demonstrating they don't understand how open source work.
@kenklippenstein Ken Klippenstein on x
Was the hundreds of millions of dollars we've burned through strictly necessary? Perhaps not. But did we learn a valuable lesson? Also no. https://x.com/...
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
I think we're going to see the exact opposite. Top AI labs will put more safeguards in place to prevent their APIs and client apps from being used to train other models. “The commoditization of AI” may end up being a very short-lived idea.
@zahirajaser Dr Zahira Jaser on x
Why are people surprised that DeepSeek is biased? Ever heard of Algorithmic bias? OpenAI is biased too, it's just that people in the West do not even see this bias as it matches their own mind-frames. We will end up using different LLMs as we use different news outlets...
@jack @jack on x
open source everything
r/OpenAI r on reddit
Sam Altman comments on DeepSeek R1
r/singularity r on reddit
Sama on DeepSeek — submitted by /u/IlustriousTea — [link] [comments]
@levie Aaron Levie on x
Some general takeaways from DeepSeek from an enterprise AI perspective: 1. This is a huge win for open weights / open source. Open weights models have continued to be the counterbalance in the system for too much profit taking by anyone AI provider. Typically this has come from
@timoreilly Tim O'Reilly on x
Spot on. Another part of the US problem is that the AI company leaders and their investors are too fixed on the pursuit or preservation of monopoly power and the outsized returns that come with it. Unless Meta had upset that apple cart with Llama, we wouldn't be seeing the
@iamdcinvestor @iamdcinvestor on x
it's not the Sputnik moment for AI it's the Raspberry Pi moment
@eastdakota Matthew Prince on x
Yup.
@jamescham James Cham on x
“That's why I say it's like the Google moment in 2004. Google filed its S-1 in 2004, and revealed to the world that they had built the largest supercomputer cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance-per-dollar point
@yishan @yishan on x
@GroundhogStrat Here is a summary of my personal take: 1) I have not heard anyone given a cogent argument against the canonical “doomer” argument. To narrow down the various flavors, this would be the views most closely aligned with @ESYudkowsky and @Kat__Woods. 1a) More specific…
@edwardbenson Ted Benson on x
This is an interesting take. I don't know enough about the mechanics of training dataflow to have an opinion, but 2004 does really seem to rhyme.
@quinnypig.com Corey Quinn on bluesky
I don't know that NVIDIA has to be the ones to make the GPUs in order to make inference work... [embedded post]
@fredbenenson Fred Benenson on threads
Has anyone heard of someone significant canceling a big NVDA purchase order because of DeepSeek? That would be meaningful true canary but I have a hard time imagining it in the short term given: • big hardware spends are budgeted far in advance • no team would choose efficienc…
@satyanadella Satya Nadella on x
Jevons paradox strikes again! As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
@dorialexander Alexander Doria on x
I feel this should be a much bigger story: DeepSeek has trained on Nvidia H800 but is running inference on the new home Chinese chips made by Huawei, the 910C. [image]
@soundboy Ian Hogarth on x
Is the main thing standing between Huawei and Nvidia access to ASML machines?
@kobeissiletter @kobeissiletter on x
The only REAL explanation as to why Nvidia, $NVDA, crashed today: 1. Clearly, DeepSeek has become a leader in AI innovation with Nvidia calling it an “excellent AI advancement” 2. In theory, AI advancement is BULLISH for Nvidia because it means more chip demand 3. The issue is
@deitaone @deitaone on x
$NVDA statement on DeepSeek “DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling. DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.
@kobeissiletter @kobeissiletter on x
The most ironic part about DeepSeek vs OpenAI: 1. OpenAI was developed by a non-profit and costs $200/month 2. DeepSeek was developed by a hedge fund and costs $0/month 3. OpenAI is actually closed-AI 4. DeepSeek is actually open-AI Talk about a turn of events.
@mouinrabbani Mouin Rabbani on x
Unable to dismiss DeepSeek on technical grounds, the main criticism being levelled against it is that it declines to give a proper account of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is presented as a sharp contrast with similar programs developed in the “free world”. It is
@jimcramer Jim Cramer on x
I fully expect our inferiority complex and a belief that Nvidia was all smoke and mirrors, will cause people to hit the bid, Nvidia and all the others. They have to, they fear “sputnik.” Yes, let's politicize the whole thing
@based_shivers Shivers on x
It's hard to believe, but due to H100 restrictions, DeepSeek was forced to train R1 manually, with thousands of Chinese citizens holding flags to act as logic gates. [image]
@kenklippenstein Ken Klippenstein on x
Weird how worried Wall Street is about DeepSeek, weren't they just saying AI innovation is good even if it harms some people in the short term
@firstadopter Tae Kim on x
The probability U.S. AI leaders will reduce AI infrastructure build for training because of a distilled copycat DeepSeek model is negligible. Inference compute supply is a legitimate question in the short term but developers will fill the void. My DeepSeek take is live [image]
@fchollet François Chollet on x
The key is really this: AI usefulness scales logarithmically with inference time compute. Right now for many use cases the amount of compute you need to operate at human-level is such that AI isn't economically viable for that use case. The more compute efficient AI gets, the m…
r/StockMarket r on reddit
Nvidia calls China's DeepSeek R1 model ‘an excellent AI advancement’
r/WallStreetbetsELITE r on reddit
Nvidia calls China's DeepSeek R1 model ‘an excellent AI advancement’
r/China r on reddit
Nvidia calls China's DeepSeek R1 model ‘an excellent AI advancement’
r/singularity r on reddit
Nvidia calls DeepSeek R1 model 'an excellent AI advancement
r/NVDA_Stock r on reddit
NVDA makes statement about DeepSeek

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