February 13, 2025 – In a recent interview with The Times Tech Podcast on Tuesday local time, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, expressed his acknowledgment of the technological prowess of Chinese AI company DeepSeek. He praised their “good performance” in developing a chatbot that can now compete with ChatGPT.
Altman revealed that he has plans to meet with this competitor, although not on the same day as his attendance at the “AI Action Summit” in Paris.
DeepSeek emerged suddenly last month, shaking up the artificial intelligence industry and triggering a sharp drop in US technology stocks. Reports indicate that this Chinese chatbot has already demonstrated comparable performance to ChatGPT in certain areas.
It is understood that the research and development costs of DeepSeek’s AI models are only a fraction of those incurred by OpenAI, which has invested billions of dollars in building its own platform. This has raised questions about the competitive advantages of leading AI companies in the United States.
Altman stated that he was surprised by the timing of DeepSeek’s emergence but not shocked by the addition of a new player in the AI field.
In previous reports, Altman has repeatedly shared his views on DeepSeek. Earlier this month, he indicated that OpenAI has no plans to sue DeepSeek, stating, “We will continue to build excellent products and lead the world with our model capabilities, which I think will be great.” Later, during a roundtable discussion at the Technical University of Berlin, he once again spoke about DeepSeek, highly praising the contributions of open source models to the world.
