DeepMind CEO Calls DeepSeek’s Achievements “Overstated”

The rise of DeepSeek’s budget-friendly AI is stirring the pot among major tech players, including Google. In a recent address, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, sought to ease concerns among his team, emphasizing Google’s dominant position in the realm of AI (reported by CNBC).

In a meeting held in Paris, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai facilitated a Q&A session, reading an employee’s question that pondered what Google could glean from DeepSeek’s rapid rise to fame.

For some context, DeepSeek made waves with the launch of its R1 V3-powered open-source model, causing NVIDIA’s market value to drop by an astounding $600 billion overnight. A research paper suggests this model outshines OpenAI’s proprietary o1 reasoning model across various domains like science, math, and coding. However, what’s catching everyone’s attention is that DeepSeek reportedly achieved these remarkable results at a minimal cost compared to traditional AI development expenses.

Hassabis, however, downplayed DeepSeek’s triumphs as “overblown,” having scrutinized the specifics more closely. He argued that DeepSeek’s touted cost-saving in model training is likely just “a fraction” of their actual expenses and noted that they likely utilized more hardware.

This development follows a report claiming DeepSeek invested $1.6 billion and acquired 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs to power its AI model.

Echoing his confidence, Hassabis stated: “We actually have more efficient, more performant models than DeepSeek. So we’re very calm and confident in our strategy, and we have all the ingredients to maintain our leadership into this year.”

Despite acknowledging DeepSeek as a formidable competitor hailing from China, Hassabis suggested that potential security and geopolitical issues might impede their progress, limiting their future growth.

Switching gears, there’s been some buzz questioning whether Google may have squandered its chance to become the AI frontrunner. Reflecting on this, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed doubts about Google’s potential to lead. He believed that Google had all it needed to dominate AI but somehow missed that opportunity. Nadella pointed out that Google is a capable entity with everything at its disposal—from data to distribution and everything in between. Interestingly, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai retorted by offering to pit Google’s models against Microsoft’s any day, hinting that Microsoft relies on external partnerships like the one with OpenAI.

Adding to the competitive mix, Nadella praised DeepSeek’s AI achievements, urging that developments from China should not be underestimated.