Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and credited with the creation of ChatGPT, recently found himself in the midst of a viral memefest after comments he made during a visit to India in 2023 resurfaced on social media. In the video, Altman was asked whether a small, smart team with a budget of $10 million could create something substantial in the AI space. His response was blunt: “It’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.”
This statement quickly became the subject of online mockery, with one Twitter user commenting, “Remember when Altman came to India and insulted our CEOs and tech industry? Our Chinese bros took affront and popped his bubble.” The meme culture around this quote grew rapidly, especially as Altman’s words came back to haunt him in light of the rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup.
“This is pretty hilarious in retrospect. In India in 2023, Altman was asked how if a small, smart team with a budget of $10 million could build something substantial within AI. His reply: “It’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models”,” said another user on X.
DeepSeek’s emergence and Altman’s reaction
DeepSeek, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, has taken the AI world by storm in recent weeks. Despite being a relatively new player, DeepSeek has quickly caught the attention of industry giants like OpenAI. Last month, benchmarks revealed that DeepSeek’s V3 large language model (LLM) outperformed several popular US tech giants’ models, including OpenAI’s, while being developed at a fraction of the cost.
Altman has since reacted positively to the competition, acknowledging DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model and praising its capabilities. In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Altman 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 continued, “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.”
Why DeepSeek has US companies worried?
While DeepSeek’s entry into the AI landscape has certainly caught the attention of Western tech firms, it has also raised significant concerns about market competition. The company’s flagship product, the V3 LLM, has garnered attention for outperforming models from tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI.
What makes this feat even more impressive is that DeepSeek achieved these results with far lower costs and processing power than its Western counterparts.
DeepSeek researchers published a paper last month detailing their V3 model’s development. The company used older Nvidia H800 chips for training, which cost around $5.6 million—a mere fraction of the billions that companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft are investing in their AI initiatives.
This significantly lower cost structure challenges the widely-held belief in the industry that the future of AI depends on ever-increasing computational power and huge financial investments.