Elon Musk mocks ‘cheap’ Chinese AI Deep Seek, shows utter dissatisfaction.
Elon Musk has expressed doubts about Deep Seek, a rising Chinese AI company, despite its praised chatbot.
Elon Musk has voiced doubt about the success of Deep Seek, a Chinese AI company that has been making headlines for its advancements in artificial intelligence.
Musk has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to express doubts about its claims, but he remains unconvinced by the company’s rapid rise. He has even mocked DeepSeek AI in one of his social media posts.
DeepSeek’s AI chatbot has been widely praised as a major breakthrough, with many comparing its capabilities to those of leading American AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Benioff applauds DeepSeek, Musk dismisses claims
When Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff lauded DeepSeek’s achievements, “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 which one user questioned, “Marc, you take the claims that this was done on a shoestring at face value?”
In that thread, Musk responded with a dismissive “Lmao, no.”
The Tesla job also poked fun at DeepSeek’s Chinese origins. When a user joked that DeepSeek’s AI model, R1, was “leaked from a lab in China,” Musk replied with a laughing emoji—an apparent reference to past controversies surrounding China’s role in global technological advancements.
Musk also shared his views on DeepSeek’s hardware capabilities, particularly its GPU usage. While DeepSeek claims to utilize approximately 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, Musk and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang speculated that the company might be concealing the true extent of its hardware resources due to US export restrictions.
Wang suggested, “DeepSeek has about 50,000 Nvidia H100s (Hopper GPUs) that they can’t talk about because of the US export controls that are in place.” Musk responded to Wang’s assertion with a simple “Obviously,” alluding DeepSeek is not being entirely transparent.
What has particularly caught the attention of industry observers is that DeepSeek reportedly achieved these impressive results with a significantly smaller investment than its Western counterparts. Following DeepSeek’s recent AI product launch Nvidia as a key GPU supplier for AI saw its market valuation plummet.
