OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has indicated that DeepSeek’s success wasn’t a one-off — it has materially altered the AI game for years to come.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that his company will have less of a lead over other companies going forward. Altman was responding to a question on DeekSeek during a Reddit AMA. “Let’s address this week’s elephant, Deepseek. Obviously a very impressive model and I’m aware it was likely trained on other LLM output. How does this change your plans for future models?” Reddit user TheorySudden5996 asked him.
“It’s a very good model!” Altman replied. “We will produce better models, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years,” he replied.
Altman seemed to be saying that DeepSeek’s release had meant that his company’s lead over the rest of the pack had shrunk, and would remain lowered for the foreseeable future. This might be because DeepSeek-R1 is open-source, which will allow other companies to build and improve on the model. DeepSeek has also provided detailed technical details on how it built its model, which gives all AI labs a theoretical explanation of how such models are built, which they can then replicate.
Altman’s admission of OpenAI’s lead being permanently lowered might be an endorsement of just how big of an event DeepSeek’s release is. Thus far, the top AI companies including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic hadn’t made their models open-source, and were giving few details on how these models were built. DeepSeek, though, has set the cat among the pigeons by not only making an extremely powerful model open-source, but also giving out much of its secret sauce on how the model was built. Altman has already said that OpenAI is considering open-sourcing some models of its own, adding that it was likely on the wrong side of history by not giving out more details on its own models. And with the world’s top AI company now saying that the actions of a Chinese lab has ensured that its lead over the rest of the pack was going to be permanently lowered, DeepSeek’s release might end up becoming one of the most pivotal events of the ongoing AI revolution.