Sam Altman signals OpenAI’s desire to partner with China after DeepSeek disrupts the AI market

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated the company would like to work with China after it blocked the mainland and other unsupported countries and territories from accessing ChatGPT and its artificial intelligence (AI) services in July last year, as reported by South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Mr Altman added, “Should we try as hard as we can [to work with China]? Absolutely, yes. I think that’s important.”  However, he did not specify any areas of collaboration in his interview with Sky News at the Paris AI Action Summit. The interview clip was posted on the British broadcaster’s website.

He added he was unsure if the US government would allow OpenAI to collaborate with China but considered it important to explore a partnership.

His remarks come in the wake of significant breakthroughs in China’s AI business, particularly from Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, which has captured global interest with its rapid progress at a fraction of the cost of the American AI giants.

DeepSeek recently released two open-source models, V3 and R1, direct competitors to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o and 01, according to Datacamp, but they cost much less and require less computing power than what major tech firms typically use for large language models (LLMs).

In late January, the tech start-up also launched its new AI image generator, Janus-Pro-7B, which it claims outperforms OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion.

Recently, the OpenAI CEO said the company was on the “wrong side of history” with its proprietary models, highlighting the progress of open-source models, which let developers modify, share, fix issues, or expand a program’s capabilities using publicly accessible source code. /TISG

Read also: Trump calls China’s DeepSeek challenge a ‘wake-up call’ as Nvidia faces nearly US$600B loss, urging cheaper, faster AI methods

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