‘War rooms’, data theft allegations and open source: How tech firms reacted to DeepSeek’s AI

The artificial intelligence (AI) bubble got a shot of air this week after China-based research lab DeepSeek said it has been closely catching up to OpenAI’s achievements using a fraction of the ChatGPT maker’s budget and energy. 

The start-up launched its AI models and a chatbot called R1 last week. It comes as big tech companies dominating AI have been throwing more money, data, and chips to get the most powerful large language models (LLMs).

This is how tech companies and leaders have responded to DeepSeek. 

Nvidia

The DeepSeek launch caused a frenzy with a sharp stock market reaction. The world’s largest chip maker Nvidia saw its shares drop 17 per cent, evaporating $593 billion (€570 billion) off its market value.

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling,” a Nvidia spokesperson told Euronews Next in a statement. 

“DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant,” it added. 

The company’s CEO Jensen Huang has not commented publicly. 

Meta

Meta has set up four “war rooms” of engineers to work out how R1 was created, according to The Information.

The publication said two of the war rooms were to focus on understanding how DeepSeek saved costs and the other two teams are analysing the data used and ways to adjust Meta’s AI model Llama’s architecture to be similar to DeepSeek’s. 

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call on Wednesday that the company would invest “very heavily in AI” spending “hundreds of billions of dollars”, especially on AI infrastructure, according to media reports. 

“I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to,” Zuckerberg said.

Yann LeCun

The chief AI scientist for Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, who is considered one of the ‘godfathers of AI’ said in a LinkedIn post that DeepSeek shows that “open source models are surpassing propriety ones”.

Open source generally means the software’s source code is available to everyone in the public domain to use, modify, and distribute.

He said DeepSeek  "came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people's work".

OpenAI

The ChatGPT maker alleged that DeepSeek might have stolen data from them. OpenAI said it had some evidence of a process called “distillation” by Chinese companies, according to media reports.

The process involves using outputs from a large, pre-trained model are used to train another smaller model.

“We know [Chinese] companies—and others—are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Euronews Next.

The spokesperson added that OpenAI has “countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology”.

For its part, OpenAI has faced lawsuits from media publications for using their data to train their models without permission. 

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman initially said that he was impressed with DeepSeek and that it was “legitimately invigorating to have a new competitor,” in a post on X. 

He added that OpenAI will continue to deliver better models. 

"More compute is more important now than ever to succeed," he said, adding that he is looking forward to bringing "AGI (artificial general intelligence) and beyond" to the world.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk launched his own AI start-up called xAI and is spending big to expand its supercomputer to incorporate more than one million graphics processing units (GPUs). 

But he suggested he is not too impressed with DeepSeek. While he hasn’t posted anything about the company on his own X platform, which he owns, he has replied to other users' comments. 

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised the China-based company for its technology. Musk replied, “Lmao, no”.

Musk also replied to a comment by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, which suggested that the company might be hiding hardware capacity due to the US chip export controls. 

Musk responded to the allegation with one word: “obviously”.

Satya Nadella

The Microsoft CEO said in a LinkedIn post: "As AI becomes more efficient and accessible, its adoption will soar, transforming it into an indispensable commodity".

He referenced Jevons Paradox, which he said was “at play again”.

The economic concept refers to the idea that technological or efficiency progress can lead to more consumption, which can then mean requiring more energy, which was not the original intention.