Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's startup chose China's DeepSeek instead of OpenAI

Intel CEO at Davos
(Image credit: WEF at Davos)

DeepSeek R1, a Chinese open-source LLM, is making waves in the tech landscape for its superior performance compared to OpenAI's best while requiring substantially fewer computing and training resources. Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger took to X and praised the model with compliments. In a chat with TechCrunch, he revealed that his startup will use DeepSeek over OpenAI.

If you haven't been keeping up with industry news, Pat Gelsinger stepped down as CEO of Intel last month and was replaced by two interim CEOs. Speculation suggests that Intel's disappointing stock market results contributed to Gelsinger's dismissal or ousting by the board. Nonetheless, Gelsinger now serves as chairman of his new startup, Gloo, which is reportedly a messaging platform for Churches.

Gloo is developing an AI service dubbed "Kallm," described briefly as an AI-powered chatbot. After comparing DeepSeek's R1 vs OpenAI's o1 model, the former was a better fit for Gloo, being open-source and likely easier to integrate. "My Gloo engineers are running R1 today, they could’ve run o1 — well, they can only access o1, through the APIs," said Gelsinger. Expanding the tweet below, you'll see that Gelsinger also shared some praise at X, thanking DeepSeek for bringing affordable AI and driving competition.

DeepSeek used Nvidia's H800 GPUs to train its R1 model but sticks with (mostly) homegrown Huawei Ascend AI accelerators (likely the Huawei 910C) for inferencing to save on costs and reduce dependence on Western hardware. Sam Atlman famously declared that AI startups with $10 million are "totally hopeless", however, DeepSeek claims its total training expenditure was just $5.6 million while requiring 11x less compute than Meta's Llama 3 405b model.

Industry experts have contested these numbers, but Gelsinger asserts, "You will never have full transparency, given most of the work was done in China. But still, all evidence is that it’s 10-50x cheaper in their training than o1." The focal point remained on how DeepSeek is pushing the industry to go open-source and find creative solutions rather than throwing hardware at the problem.

DeepSeek is under investigation by Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly using data from ChatGPT illicitly in distillation. Likewise, DeepSeek collects hordes of user data and stores it in servers based in China, though at least they are transparent about their practices.

Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

  • hotaru251

    Gelsinger now serves as chairman of his new startup, Gloo, which is reportedly a messaging platform for Churches

    ...why does a church msg platform need ai????


    also
    DeepSeek is under investigation by Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly using data from ChatGPT illicitly in distillation.

    because every "ai" did exact same thing? you an't call foul play when every one of them didn't pay for the content used to train the systems at start.

    A thief cant report being robbed of what they robbed to begin with.
    Reply
  • SonoraTechnical
    man... 63 years old and worth an estimated 85 million dollars even after the intel stock price slide. He has 8 grandchildren.... retire man....
    Reply
  • PBme
    SonoraTechnical said:
    man... 63 years old and worth an estimated 85 million dollars even after the intel stock price slide. He has 8 grandchildren.... retire man....
    Seriously. Don't get rich older folks that are like "yeah, I want to slave over a company 24x7". May be the same obsessive traits that got them to exec positions but logically seems dumb. Dude could drop from a heart attack any time. Even if he makes it, you have maybe 10-15 years left of enough mobility to do a lot of types of travelling. The world is rapidly on its way to burning (figuratively and literally). 1000 reasons to maximize the little time he has to enjoy being on this earth and this is what he wants to do?

    Also, seems laughably stupid to base anything in your company on a chinese AI product. Countdown to it being banned in 3..2...
    Reply
  • King_V
    hotaru251 said:

    DeepSeek is under investigation by Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly using data from ChatGPT illicitly in distillation.because every "ai" did exact same thing? you an't call foul play when every one of them didn't pay for the content used to train the systems at start.

    A thief cant report being robbed of what they robbed to begin with.
    My thoughts exactly? Isn't this the very same OpenAI whose CEO said they NEED to be be exempt from any laws regarding copyright or intellectual property, or they won't be able to make it?

    That's a lot of chutzpah for OpenAI to be part of this investigation.
    Reply
  • soclibfiscon
    Must have been a pretty short investigation by Microsoft. I just saw an article saying that MS is hosting deepseek on Azure.
    Reply
  • phead128
    OpenAI has stolen data from newspapers, publishers, artists, everywhere, so now crying that it's data is trained on, hilarious.
    Reply
  • evdjj3j
    SonoraTechnical said:
    man... 63 years old and worth an estimated 85 million dollars even after the intel stock price slide. He has 8 grandchildren.... retire man....
    Work is a lot different when you're one of the ones at the top.
    Reply
  • Deepwinter
    PBme said:
    Seriously. Don't get rich older folks that are like "yeah, I want to slave over a company 24x7". May be the same obsessive traits that got them to exec positions but logically seems dumb. Dude could drop from a heart attack any time. Even if he makes it, you have maybe 10-15 years left of enough mobility to do a lot of types of travelling. The world is rapidly on its way to burning (figuratively and literally). 1000 reasons to maximize the little time he has to enjoy being on this earth and this is what he wants to do?

    Also, seems laughably stupid to base anything in your company on a chinese AI product. Countdown to it being banned in 3..2...
    He clearly does it because he enjoys Working, it probably keeps him in a healthy routine, my dads in his mid 70s he still goes to work every day, leaves the house at 7am and leaves the office at lunch time.

    I'm sure he's not using deepseeks API he's most likely running the model on his own hardware, or using an American company's version of deepseek R1
    It's already available on grok. Not the twitter Groq but the actually Ai company called groq.com
    They are 20 X cheaper per input token and 60x cheaper per output token.
    Based on openais per million token API calls same for Groq.com

    In fairness Groq is using a distilled version of 70 billion parameters but it is showing similar results to the 671p version.

    I suspect open ai will be forced to implement many of the innovations demonstrated by deepseek into there next AI, because the price difference is to much now.
    Reply
  • christopher.andrew.carr
    " ... superior performance compared to OpenAI's best .. "

    No, OpenAI 's best is o3. It is not superior to that. It's about on par with o1. And it's neck and neck with Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (but Gemini is much faster) -- and Google has the larger base model 2.0 Thinking coming soon.

    People need to chill, and ask themselves if they actually know what they're talking about in this topic before they hit "enter."
    Reply
  • King_V
    christopher.andrew.carr said:
    People need to chill, and ask themselves if they actually know what they're talking about in this topic before they hit "enter."
    Excuse me, but this is The Internet™, and having to know what you're talking about before posting something? Well, that's just crazy talk! 😅
    Reply