Ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit, Demis Hassabis praised the Chinese startup behind DeepSeek R1 but said the hype around the new AI model was exaggerated.

DeepSeek continues to receive high praise, this time from a Nobel laureate. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind, praised the AI model developed by the Chinese startup as “an impressive piece of work.

I think it’s probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis reportedly said at an event hosted by Google ahead of the two-day Paris AI Action Summit which begins on Monday.

He said DeepSeek’s success is due to “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.

Last month, DeepSeek claimed that it has developed its open-source, reasoning AI model called R1 at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips.

The announcement triggered a broader stock sell-off in global markets and sent shock waves across the tech industry.

However, Hassabis said the hype around DeepSeek has been “exaggerated a little bit.” “Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance…it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he added.

The tech industry is on the path towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is, an AI system exhibiting all the cognitive capabilities of humans, the entrepreneur said.

“I think we’re close now, you know, maybe we are only, you know, perhaps five years or something away from a system like that which would be pretty extraordinary,” Hassabis said.