OpenAI Finally Has a Competitor, says CEO Sam Altman

In a series of tweets, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged DeepSeek as an emerging rival on Tuesday and praised the advanced capabilities of its new R1 model. As DeepSeek takes over the internet and the stock market, Altman also expressed confidence that OpenAI will continue to produce even stronger and more advanced systems.

“DeepSeek’s R1 is an impressive model,” Altman wrote. “We will obviously deliver much better models, and it’s invigorating to have a new competitor!”

As the conversation about computing heated up with the crash of semiconductor stocks yesterday, Altman added, “We believe more computing is more important than ever before to succeed at our mission. The world is going to want to use a lot of AI and will be amazed by the next-generation models coming.”

It is interesting to note that while OpenAI is charging $200 a month for its version of the o1 reasoning model, DeekSeek is offering it for free.  “Ironic that we got free AI from a hedge fund and $200/month AI from a nonprofit,” Avichal, co-founder at Electric Capital, said.

This morning, US President Donald Trump described China’s DeepSeek AI model as a “wake-up call” for American firms while welcoming it as a positive development toward more rapid and cost-effective methods of advancing AI. Interestingly, he also announced that the US will soon place tariffs on all semiconductors and pharmaceuticals imported from Taiwan. 

After the stock market collapsed, Deepseek introduced a fresh lineup of models, even though many were still adjusting to R1. The standout among the bunch is Janus-Pro – an advanced autoregressive framework designed to unify multimodal understanding and generation. By separating visual encoding into distinct pathways but keeping a single transformer at its core, Janus-Pro avoids the usual conflicts and gains extra flexibility.

“The main two implications of DeepSeek are (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,” The Wharton School’s professor Ethan Mollick said.

Yesterday, tech giants like NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Alphabet saw their stock prices plunge, while the Nasdaq 100 and Europe’s Stoxx 600 tech sub-index bled nearly $1 trillion in market cap. 

US stocks, particularly in the semiconductor sector, saw significant losses, while Chinese markets held steady, with their strongest performance relative to US markets in over two years. Chip maker NVIDIA’s shares were down nearly 15% on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in early trade on Monday.  

Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”