In some news I’m sure you didn’t expect, ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has come out praising China’s new AI wonder child — DeepSeek — and that the former Intel boss is buying up NVIDIA stock as it has experienced a sharp drop in its value after DeepSeek came in like an (AI) wrecking ball.
In a new post on X, Gelsinger explained: Wisdom is learning the lessons we thought we already knew. DeepSeek reminds us of three important learnings from computing history:
- Computing obeys the gas law. Making it dramatically cheaper will expand the market for it. The markets are getting it wrong, this will make AI much more broadly deployed.
- Engineering is about constraints. The Chinese engineers had limited resources, and they had to find creative solutions.
- Open Wins. DeepSeek will help reset the increasingly closed world of foundational AI model work. Thank you DeepSeek team.
Gelsinger was the CEO of Intel until December 2024, after he exited the company amongst controversy and now is the chairman of his own IPO-bound startup — Gloo — which is a messaging and engagement platform for churches. In his tenure at Intel, Gelsinger was trying to get Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators to compete with NVIDIA… and we all know how that went, because it didn’t.
Furthermore, DeepSeek’s new R1 model is so impressive that Gloo is already using it over OpenAI, while the new startup is building an AI service dubbed Kallm, which will feature a chatbot and other AI services. Gelsinger told TechCrunch: “My Gloo engineers are running R1 today. They could’ve run o1 – well, they can only access o1, through the APIs“.