Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella had some kind words for DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup that roiled his company’s shares earlier this week.

The Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the world of AI last week after showing its supercheap R1 model could compete directly with OpenAI’s o1. While it wiped nearly $600 billion off Nvidia’s market value,

Microsoft brings the Chinese DeepSeek R1 Chinese LLM to Azure and GitHub. The Redmond giant also issued user guides for developers.

OpenAI—which faces multiple lawsuits for using content without permission—accuses DeepSeek of 'distillation,' a technique that use larger models' outputs to improve smaller ones.