Google parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has finally broken his silence on Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which has been all over the news in recent weeks. Pichai called the DeepSeek team as ‘tremendous’ and went on to state that the company has done ‘very, very good work’ but contended that Google’s AI models are also comparable to the Chinese rival in terms of cost efficiency.
The Google CEO also stated that the cost of using AI frontier models will keep going down which will help the company drive ‘extraordinary use cases’.
Speaking during Alphabet’s latest earnings call, Pichai said (via TechCrunch), “Part of the reason we are so excited about the AI opportunity is we know we can drive extraordinary use cases because the cost of actually using it is going to keep coming down, which will make more use cases feasible… And that’s the opportunity space. It’s as big as it comes, and that’s why you’re seeing us invest to meet that moment.”
Google vs DeepSeek:
Pichai went on compared Google’s Gemini models with DeepSeek, and stated that his models perform better on Pareto frontier – a set of optimal solutions that represent best trade off between different functions.
“If you look at all three attributes, I think we lead this Pareto frontier… They are some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek’s V3 and R1, and I think a lot of it is our strength of the full stack: development, end-to-end optimization, our obsession with cost-per-query.” Pichai was quoted as saying by Business Insider.
What is DeepSeek? Why is everyone talking about it?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI statup which shot to fame after its two open source models V3 and R1 matched their Western counterparts while being claimed to have been built on a much cheaper cost and with older Nvidia chips.
The rise of DeepSeek has quashed the existing notion that building newer and powerful AI foundational models would require ever increasing amounts of computing power and capital, leading on increasing pressure on Google, OpenAI, Meta and the rest to rationalize their AI spending.
Pichai’s Alphabet announced on Tuesday that it will spend $75 billion on AI, which is around 29% more than the Wall Street expectations, as per Reuters. The investment by Alphabet is comparable to the $80 billion commitment by Microsoft and $65 billion commitment by Meta. However, with DeepSeek soaring in popularity despite the low costs, the Big tech companies will increasingly find it difficult to justify the increasing investments on AI.
