Elon Musk is not convinced with all the claims and ‘noise’ about China’s AI startup DeepSeek’s claims. To add context: US chip-maker Nvidia saw its market cap get wiped by over $500 billion on Monday, January 27, after the emergence of a low-cost Chinese generative AI model that could threaten US dominance in the fast-growing industry. The AI chatbot developed by DeepSeek has apparently shown the ability to match the capacity of US AI pace-setters for a fraction of the investments made by American companies.
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Responding to all the hype and chatter on the same, Elon Musk suggested that DeepSeek may possess around 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs.This is opposed to the 10,000 A100s that DeepSeek claims to have. Musk shared his opinion in reply to recent comments by Alexandr Wang, the billionaire CEO of Scale AI, who also stated that DeepSeek likely has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100s.
Musk and Wang both believe that DeepSeek is unable to disclose the true number of GPUs due to US export controls currently in place. Speaking to media on US-China AI Arms race, Wang said that DeepSeek has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that they can’t talk about because of the US export controls that are in place. The interview has been shared on Twitter by a user named Chubby. Responding to Wang’s interview clip; Elon Musk wrote: “Obviously”, affirming his agreement with Wang’s observation.
In response to another post, Elon Musk called it ‘DeeperSeek’.
Musk also responded to a post from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who had written: “Deepseek is now #1 on the AppStore, surpassing ChatGPT—no NVIDIA supercomputers or $100M needed. The real treasure of AI isn’t the UI or the model—they’ve become commodities. The true value lies in data and metadata, the oxygen fueling AI’s potential. The future’s fortune? It’s in our data. Deepgold.”
To this, Musk replied, “Lmao no.” (here LMAO stands for Laughing My Ass Off).
Musk also made fun of the startup being a product of China’s lab; jokingly linking it to Coronavirus that too originated from a Lab in China. “R1 was leaked from a lab in China,” posted a user. Elon Musk replied with ‘Face with tears of Joy’ emoji.