This week, Silicon Valley leaders confronted their first serious AI rival from China: DeepSeek. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, sensing the heat, said his company will launch some products a little earlier than planned. Other industry leaders said it validated the worth of open-source models at a time when companies have been growing more secretive.
But most tech leaders, especially those who build services on top of AI systems, said a new entrant would help lower prices and expand the market by making AI more accessible.
Here are some of the top leaders' reactions:
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, on X: "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!"
- Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce: "This is kind of classic in our industry. The pioneers are not the ones who end up being the victors."
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, on X: "As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of."
- Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, on Threads: "To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think: 'China is surpassing the US in AI.' You are reading this wrong. The correct reading is: 'Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.'"
- Ali Ghodsi, CEO of data management company Databricks: "The game here [in the U.S.] was to throw as much money at it as possible. In China, they took a different path with much more frugal and intelligent approaches."
- Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, on X: "1) Computing obeys the gas law. Making it dramatically cheaper will expand the market for it. The markets are getting it wrong, this will make AI much more broadly deployed."
