- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that DeepSeek will inevitably help the American AI industry rather than hurt it.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella isn’t pressed about Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s recent success.
During Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call with investors and analysts on Wednesday, Nadella was asked about artificial intelligence scaling in light of the success of DeepSeek.
“What’s happening with AI is no different than what was happening with the regular compute cycle,” Nadella replied. “It’s always about bending the curve and then putting more points up the curve.”
On Monday, DeepSeek sent U.S. tech stocks plummeting, as the platform proved its ability to compete with American AI at what it claimed to be a fraction of the cost.
“I think DeepSeek has had some real innovation,” Nadella said.
He emphasized that the efforts of DeepSeek will become commoditized and broadly used throughout AI platforms. He compared the switch to data storage from server to cloud. Although it’s not the same thing, more people switched to cloud storage based solely on pricing.
“And so when token prices fall, inference computing prices fall, that means people can consume more and there will be more apps written,” Nadella said.
The CEO was impressed by the speed of advancement and the power of the AI models. “It’s unimaginable to think that here we are in sort of beginning of ‘25, where on the PC you can run a model that required pretty massive cloud infrastructure.”
“So that type of optimization means AI will be much more ubiquitous, and so therefore, for a hyperscaler like us, a PC platform provider like us, this is all good news as far as I’m concerned,” Nadella said.