Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the R1 model of the startup of Chinese AI Deepseek was the first model of AI that he had seen who was as competitive as Openai.
“Openai was so far that no one really gets closer,” said Nadella in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published Thursday.
“Deepseek, and R1 in particular, was the first model that I saw published points,” added Nadella.
In January, Deepseek frightened investors after its free chatbot application reached first place in Apple App Store ranking. The highly efficient models of Deepseek but relatively cheaper triggered a sale in AI -related shares, because investors wondered if this would drop the demand for IA equipment such as Nvidia chips.
Microsoft began to offer versions of the Deepseek R1 model on its cloud platform, Azure Ai Foundry, in January. Aside from Deepseek, the platform includes other models of companies like Openai, Meta and Mistral.
The use of R1 on the Microsoft platform meant that the data would not be sent to the Deepseek servers in China.
Asha Sharma, a Microsoft corporate vice-president who heads the company’s AI platform product, wrote in a blog article in January that R1 underwent “rigorous team and security assessments” before being made available to customers.
In January, the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, described R1 as “an impressive model, especially around what they are able to deliver for the price”. Altman said Openai “would output” in response to the “invigorating” competition from Deepseek.
“R1 is actually not so unusual,” said Ben Buchanan, a former special adviser for artificial intelligence in the Biden administration, in an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” which was broadcast in March.
Buchanan said that if the Deepseek engineers are “extremely talented”, he did not think that the “media threshing around it was justified”.
“Where do you think they have increased their performance? We read their papers. These are intelligent people who have exactly the same type of algorithmic efficiency as companies like Google and Anthropic and Openai Font,” added Buchanan.
Microsoft, Openai and Deepseek did not respond to requests for comments from Business Insider.
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