Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has finally addressed the rising buzz around Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. He praised the DeepSeek team as "tremendous" and acknowledged their "very, very good work," but also emphasized that Google’s AI models are equally competitive, particularly in terms of cost efficiency.

The Google CEO also stated that the cost of using AI frontier models will keep going down which will help the company drive ‘extraordinary use cases’. 

Speaking during Alphabet's latest earnings call, Pichai said (via TechCrunch), “Part of the reason we are so excited about the AI opportunity is we know we can drive extraordinary use cases because the cost of actually using it is going to keep coming down, which will make more use cases feasible… And that’s the opportunity space. It’s as big as it comes, and that’s why you’re seeing us invest to meet that moment”.

Pichai further compared Google's Gemini models with DeepSeek, emphasizing that his models perform better on the Pareto frontier — a set of optimal solutions that showcase the best trade-offs between various functions.

"If you look at all three attributes, I think we lead this Pareto frontier… They are some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek's V3 and R1, and I think a lot of it is our strength of the full stack: development, end-to-end optimization, our obsession with cost-per-query". Pichai was quoted as saying by Business Insider.