DeepSeek And China v The World... Who Wins?
💬 Quick CONVERSATION STARTERS:
What’s the fuss about DeepSeek?
Everybody seems to have an opinion on DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence app that took the world by storm, topping downloads on the app stores. It’s China’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and AI platforms developed by American tech giants.
Not only DeepSeek sparked a financial panic, but it also caught the attention of US President Donald Trump and his top advisor Elon Musk.
DeepSeek is comparable to other AI models released by leading American companies, except it is built with less computing power at a much lower cost, and mostly open source. But it’s built in China — thus, a big competitor for AI dominance AND a potential national security threat.
DeepSeek is under review, investigated, blocked or banned in several countries, including Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium, South Korea, Ireland, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Taiwan, according to
. Separately, both Texas and Australia banned it on government devices.Why is Trump positive?
Trump doesn’t seem to be worried and said: “I view that as a positive, as an asset. The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”
How has the tech and AI community reacted, after they freaked out?
Elon Musk’s AI safety advisor
was asked by CNN’s Pamela Brown which country is leading in the AI race, China or the US, given the DeepSeek breakthrough: “I think it's basically tied, and one can assume that for the intelligence of the models, this will continue to be the case.”OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman: “This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for democratic AI to win. This is a strong model and I think it's a reminder also of the level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.” [OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor.]
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei: “What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. This has never happened before and is geopolitically significant. However, US companies will soon follow suit — and they won’t do this by copying DeepSeek, but because they too are achieving the usual trend in cost reduction.”
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang: DeepSeek has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that they can't talk about because of the US export controls that are in place. [To which Elon Musk agrees.]
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg: There’s going to be an open source standard globally. And I think for our kind of national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “DeepSeek has some real innovations. What's happening with AI is no different than what was happening with the regular compute cycle. It's always about bending the curve and then putting more points up the curve.”
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: “The truth is often not the craziest doomer takes you see on the internet.”
What is the Substack community saying about DeepSeek?
- stated: “What’s clear is that a lot about AI’s future impacts is still unknown.”
- highlighted: “For years, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have dominated the artificial intelligence space. But DeepSeek R1 just changed the game.”
- wrote: “The DeepSeek momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Since the release of its latest LLM DeepSeek-V3 and reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, the tech community has been abuzz with excitement.”
- clarified: “It’s important to clarify that R-1 isn’t ‘smarter’ than earlier models, just trained far more efficiently. R-1 itself hasn’t necessarily moved the needle on the grand promise of AGI, but it has undeniably sparked an economic and geopolitical reckoning.”
- pointed out: “Beyond the immediate excitement of having a new, capable chatbot, R1’s emergence underscores a deeper, more complex narrative in the AI community: the race to AGI and the evolving balance between China and the United States.”
- noted: “DeepSeek has proven itself not just as a competitor but as a model for how AI development might look in the future, where efficiency, openness, and innovation under constraints redefine what's possible. This shift could have long-term implications for how AI technologies are developed, shared, and regulated globally.”
- said: “Ultimately, the AI race may not have a clear winner. For now, China and the United States may be ‘running different races’, with China aiming for cheaper commercialization and expertise in AI interference, leading to the ability to engineer AI applications efficiently, while the United States is seeking to lead in cutting-edge AI innovation using advanced chips.”
- explained: “Over the last 60 years, the cost of computing power has plunged as people figured out how to pack more transistors on a computer chip. And during that same period, companies like Intel and Nvidia grew rapidly because demand for computing power went through the roof. I expect something similar to happen with AI. It might require less computing power to generate any given token with a DeepSeek model. But lower costs will greatly increase the number of tokens people generate.”
- wrote: “Yes, there are certainly potential consequences to an AI that can potentially run more efficiently. There are also many benefits that will come from increased competition.”
- pointed out: “The major technological breakthrough in DeepSeek R1, is one that is already foundationally changing how companies build LLMs. They proved that for reasoning, you don’t need to have the most SFT data in the world, what you need is a lot of reasoning data, which at the end of the day is human data, highly optimized through GRPO, i.e. a new reward system that massively amplifies the value of this reasoning data.”
- said: “DeepSeek’s entry signals the end of the one-size-fits-all AI model. It is part of a broader shift towards open-weight AI models. The choice for product builders now isn’t just about choosing between OpenAI vs. DeepSeek—it’s about figuring out which model is the best for your specific use case.”
- wrote: “I believe the main reason and cause for the general excitement around DeepSeek is their web UI, which is analogous to ChatGPT. With the same basic features as ChatGPT, but with the added streaming of the internal reasoning and context management of the UI.
This is such a clever UX trick to engage the user while the model works out the final answer, but gives a level of transparency and awe where the user sees the internal reasoning.”
- argued: “Claims that ‘China has leap ahead’ also don’t make sense. DeepSeek is a fast-follower that reverse-engineered what OpenAI did. US AI firms have been ahead but never years ahead, and the followers have been able to replicate what the leading AI labs do, typically in 6 to 12 months. […] China is not leading, but they are highly capable and competitive.”
What GenZ got to do with DeepSeek?
According to Emma Burleigh in Fortune, DeepSeek’s meteoric rise is “powered by CEO Liang Wenfeng’s unconventional leadership—a sharp departure from the Silicon Valley norm—and a bet on Gen Z talent.”
The 40-year-old DeepSeek founder who took the company to over a valuation of over $1 billion in the 2 years since inception, “is looking to Gen Z and humanities majors to spearhead his revolutionary AI—unconventionally so, work experience isn’t at the top of his list when considering DeepSeek candidates.”
Liang was quoted as saying back in 2023: “If you are pursuing short-term goals, it is right to find people with ready experience. But if you look at the long-term, experience is not that important. Basic skills, creativity, and passion are much more important.”
has recently wrote in : “Corporate culture is often overused and ill-defined. For Liang Wenfeng, the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, though, there is no ambiguity about DeepSeek’s corporate values, which are reflected in every step of its talent strategy and incentive structure. Curiosity, passion and self-motivation — these are values Silicon Valley has long preached, but DeepSeek, the student from China, actually practices them with conviction.”Food for thought!
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