Nvidia calls Chinas DeepSeek R1 model an excellent AI advancement [Video]

Nvidia called DeepSeek’s R1 model “an excellent AI advancement,” despite the Chinese startup’s emergence causing the chipmaker’s stock price to plunge 17% on Monday.

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling,”  an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC on Monday. “DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”

The comments come after DeepSeek last week released R1, which is an open-source reasoning model that reportedly outperformed the best models from U.S. companies such as OpenAI. R1’s self-reported training cost was less than $6 million, which is a fraction of the billions that Silicon Valley companies are spending to build their artificial intelligence models. 

Nvidia’s statement indicates that it sees DeepSeek’s breakthrough as creating more work for the American chipmaker’s graphics processing units, or GPUs. 

“Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs …