Apple CEO Tim Cook has lauded the AI models from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek for driving ‘efficiency’ in the field of artificial intelligence. Notably, DeepSeek had recently taken over ChatGPT on US app stores, leading to noticeable panic among AI giants as all notions of America’s supremacy in the field were broken.
During the Apple’s earnings call with investors, Cook was asked about how DeepSeek’s AI models would impact Apple’s margins to which the veteran tech executive said (via TechCrunch), “In general, I think innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing. And, you know, that’s what you see in that model,”
Cook was also asked about Apple’s AI strategy, to which he went on to explain the ‘hybrid’ approach taken by the company, saying (via Business Insider), “From a CapEx point of view, we’ve always taken a very prudent, deliberative approach to our expenditure, and we continue to leverage a hybrid model, which I think continues to serve as well,”
Notably, Apple currently only has a partnership with ChatGPT which allows the company’s Siri voice assistant to direct some complex queries to OpenAI’s chatbot with the user’s permission. While Apple has stated in the past that it is open to also employing AI models from Google and Anthropic, a concrete arrangement hasn’t been announced yet. Cook also didn’t confirm if Apple could integrate the open-source models from DeepSeek in a future upgrade.
OpenAI vs DeepSeek:
DeepSeek claimed in a paper last month that its V3 language model was built at a cost of just $5.6 million and trained on older-generation Nvidia H800 GPUs, compared to the billions spent by Google, Anthropic and OpenAI on building similar models.
However, OpenAI on Thursday claimed that DeepSeek was employing a technique called ‘distillation’ in order to train its AI models on train its rival models, potentially undermining some of the achievements of the Chinese upstart.
