News of Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s success continues to send ripples throughout the West, tanking Nvidia’s stock valuation, spawning endless discourse, and embarrassing President Trump.
Now, even American startup gurus are starting to jump ship. Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of tech superpower Intel, says that after seeing DeepSeek’s tech, his new church startup — called, no joke, Gloo — is foregoing OpenAI’s tech in favor of an in-house model.
“My Gloo engineers are running [DeepSeek’s] R1 today,” Gelsinger told TechCrunch. “They could’ve run [OpenAI’s] o1 — well, they can only access o1, through the APIs.”
Gelsinger — who left Intel under a dark cloud last year as the chipmaker’s financial woes deepened — enthused that DeepSeek will lower the cost to develop similar models, decreasing the barrier to entry in the industry.
And the godly CEO isn’t alone. Tech journalists have been quick to note DeepSeek’s faster and cheaper performance compared to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Even Trump admitted to eating a certain amount of crow, calling DeepSeek a “wake-up call” at a House GOP meeting.
The newly-minted president further sang DeepSeek’s praises, admitting the R1 model could be “very much a positive development” if American companies could leverage the model to cut down on their own astronomical costs.
Not everyone is as excited for the Chinese tech as Trump, though.
After several days of brooding in silence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a retort: “We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”
The now right-wing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was likewise in a frenzy, reportedly assembling several “war rooms” worth of engineers to pick apart the Chinese software for the corporation’s own purposes.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, took a break from slamming Altman to complain alongside Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang that DeepSeek is lying about having only 20,000 H100 graphics cards, an accusation that neither CEO has backed with evidence.
“My understanding is that DeepSeek has about 50,000 H100s, which they can’t talk about, Wang posited on CNBC, “because it is against the export controls that the United States has put in place.”
Startup investor Joshua Kushner took to X-formerly-Twitter to follow Musk’s lead.
“‘Pro America’ technologists openly supporting a Chinese model that was trained off of leading US frontier models,” he whined, “with chips that likely violate export controls, and — according to their own terms of service — take US customer data back to China.” (DeepSeek can run on local hardware rather than the company’s app, a choice most US companies don’t give users, from whom they absolutely do harvest data.)
Vaguely xenophobic accusations aside, no amount of mewling online can change the fact that DeepSeek has shaken up the game. The onus is now on the American tech sector to demonstrate why they still deserve the most lavish infrastructure investment in the history of mankind.
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