Sam Altman said startups with only $10 million were 'totally hopeless' competing with OpenAI, DeepSeek's disruption says otherwise
But today the OpenAI boss has posted a thread complimenting the 'impressive' DeepSeek r1.

Sam Altman's comments on the prospects of startups hoping to break through in the AI business may have come back to bite him. Several posts on X (and probably other platforms) ridicule the OpenAI boss and co-founder's dismissal of potential competition emanating from the startup scene, particularly those with only limited financial resources in the range of $10 million. Altman's comments were made during a Q&A session after a 'Conversations' presentation to India VCs, recorded in June 2023. The comments seem way off the mark in early 2025, with DeepSeek now on the scene claiming its groundbreaking model only cost $5.6 million to train.
This is pretty hilarious in retrospect.In India in 2023, Altman was asked how if a small, smart team with a budget of $10 million could build something substantial within AI.His reply: "It’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models" https://t.co/pdYIhV2x1mJanuary 28, 2025
Entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand reckons that Altman's response in the above clip is "pretty hilarious in retrospect." In other words, Bertrand thinks Altman's dismissal of the Indian VC's question about startups challenging the likes of OpenAI showed a startling lack of foresight.
The video begins with the VC stating that there is a very vibrant startup ecosystem in India. He goes on to muse whether Altman might see a gap in the AI business, one which an Indian startup could fill. More specifically, the VC asks whether a trio of super-smart engineers from India "with say, not $100M, but $10M – could build something truly substantial?"
Altman's response was quite dismissive of the VC's well-mannered query. "Look, the way this works is we're going to tell you it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models. You shouldn't try, and it's your job to try anyway, and I believe both of those things," was Altman's disjointed stream-of-consciousness style reply, followed by audience titters. "I think it is pretty hopeless," he added, possibly wishing to soften his initial response.
deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price.we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.January 28, 2025
To Altman's credit, earlier today he posted a thread on X praising the catalyst behind his recent social media ridiculing. The launch of China's DeepSeek has caused significant AI business and tech industry tremors, and Altman has now publicly admitted it is "an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price."
Nevertheless, like the funding-hungry CEO he is, Altman quickly turned the thread around to OpenAI promising jam tomorrow, with the execution of the firm's roadmap, amazing next-gen AI models, and "bringing you all AGI and beyond."
The amount of money DeepSeek truly spent on training its model, which it claims is $5.6 million, is contested. However, despite those contentions, it is clear that the company pulled off training a frontier model with disruptively low costs, shocking the US titans of AI.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
-
Gururu Gates, Jobs, Wozniak...even Zuckerberg. I am missing something about Altman that lumps him with these fellas?Reply -
passivecool "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943Reply
We all get stuff wrong every day. Be kind. -
Findecanor
Who lumps Wozniak in with Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg?Gururu said:Gates, Jobs, Wozniak...even Zuckerberg. I am missing something about Altman that lumps him with these fellas?
Wozniak is a skilled engineer who believe in computing freedom. The others are/were not, and do/did not.
Altman is a tech-bro and sociopath who wishes he was Zuckerberg.
The commercial closed company called "OpenAI" has an edge over its competition in that it scraped the web before the web was poisoned by AI content and people who had intellectual property on the web found out for what purpose it was being scraped.
I'd think that a small startup could very well compete with "OpenAI", if it produced something that was actually useful and the company had a manager who knew what he was doing. -
Notton $5.6M in investment and tank competition's stock by $1T.Reply
It's gonna be so funny watching that bubble burst. -
oofdragon
Imagine the day Nvidia comes back crawling to gamers as their main revenueNotton said:$5.6M in investment and tank competition's stock by $1T.
It's gonna be so funny watching that bubble burst. -
The Historical Fidelity In my opinion, Sam Altman is a major reason why DeepSeek was able to make major strides so quickly. We only learned of the 2023 servers hack of OpenAI by a group associated with a certain foreign country’s interests a year and a half after it happened…and Altman decided not to tell the public, the FBI, or any other entity about it for over a year…Also, if you look at the OpenAI help forums, there have been numerous threads created over the past year about people’s accounts being hacked and the sudden appearance of multiple entire conversations in Chinese language within their account…I don’t know, maybe I’m being paranoid, but something doesn’t seem right about DeepSeek…Reply -
3en88
It's a copycat model after all, trained on chatGPT output. It will sometimes identify itself as chatGPT which exposes where its responses come from. That's no surprise all the Chinese ever did was steal, cheat and copy. Never in history has a Chinese invented anything or built anything original.The Historical Fidelity said:In my opinion, Sam Altman is a major reason why DeepSeek was able to make major strides so quickly -
pug_s
Is that why western developers couldn't replicate what developers of Deepseek is doing?3en88 said:It's a copycat model after all, trained on chatGPT output. It will sometimes identify itself as chatGPT which exposes where its responses come from. That's no surprise all the Chinese ever did was steal, cheat and copy. Never in history has a Chinese invented anything or built anything original. -
acadia11
I don’t call responses d…. But this is it. China and Asia as a whole is the birth place of nearly all man’s transformative inventions until about 2 centuries ago … they just became stale as society not that it was one society during the 1th 17th century … I’m skeptical on their claims because well geo-political implications … but necessity is the mother of invention. but this idea that China or Asia is some sort of backwards world is wrong it’s 5000 year old contiguous culture … when you pick up a book or a gun … what are your thoughts.? If they did what they said is impressive imho doesn’t solve the problem as to where this game is going and future techz.3en88 said:It's a copycat model after all, trained on chatGPT output. It will sometimes identify itself as chatGPT which exposes where its responses come from. That's no surprise all the Chinese ever did was steal, cheat and copy. Never in history has a Chinese invented anything or built anything original. -
SomeoneElse23
Perhaps you mean the CCP?3en88 said:It's a copycat model after all, trained on chatGPT output. It will sometimes identify itself as chatGPT which exposes where its responses come from. That's no surprise all the Chinese ever did was steal, cheat and copy. Never in history has a Chinese invented anything or built anything original.
I thought the original Chinese invented gunpowder?