Google CEO Sundar Pichai has highlighted the efficiency of the company’s Gemini AI model, emphasising its cost-effectiveness and performance advantages, particularly in comparison to DeepSeek’s models which made waves in the AI industry due to their reported money-saving and impressive capabilities.
During the Google-parent company Alphabet’s Q4 2024 earnings call, Pichai acknowledged the ‘impressive work’ of DeepSeek’s team.“I think [DeepSeek has] a tremendous team. I think they’ve done very, very good work,” Pichai noted.
However, he emphasised Google’s focus on driving efficiency in serving AI models, highlighting Gemini’s strengths in balancing cost, performance, and latency.
“If you look at one of the areas in which the Gemini model shines is the Pareto frontier of cost performance in latency. And if you look at all three attributes, I think we are — we lead this period of frontier,” the executive explained.
Gemini 2.0 Flash models are efficient, compared to DeepSeek: Pichai
The executive further pointed out the efficiency of Gemini 2.0 Flash models and Gemini 2.0 Flash thinking models, comparing them to DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models.
“And I would say both our 2.0 Flash models, our 2.0 Flash thinking models, are some of the most efficient models out there, including DeepSeek’s V3 and R1,” he added.
“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. All of that, I think, sets as well for the workloads had – both to serve billions of users across our products and on the cloud side,” Pichai explained.
The executive also highlighted the increasing proportion of spending on inference compared to training over the past three years.
“I think 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,” Pichai concluded.