Sam Altman’s old remark on AI scene in India goes viral amid rise of China’s DeepSeek

A Chinese AI startup took the world and AI experts by surprise after it claimed to have built an immensely popular chatbot at a fraction of the cost of those created by tech giants in the US. At a supposed training cost of just $6 million, the DeepSeek R1 outperformed some of the leading AI models. Amid these, internet sleuths have unearthed an old video of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – a company that ignited the artificial intelligence revolution. In the old video, he states that AI startups with a $10 million budget are “totally hopeless”.