Even after some time to calm down, experts believe that the artificial intelligence model released by the Chinese startup DeepSeek last month has “forever altered the trajectory of the global rivalry in tech.” That’s the conclusion of Hong Kong venture capitalist Jennifer Zhu Scott, writing in the Financial Times over the weekend.
DeepSeek’s success has raised fundamental questions about the prevailing research model — which relies on vast sums of money and huge amounts of compute — and shattered assumptions about China’s ability to innovate. It’s also being seen as proof of the failure of U.S. policy to restrict China’s access to the most high-end chips to prevent just this sort of advance. The first reckoning is long overdue; the second conclusion is premature.
DeepSeek burst into the headlines last month when it released a paper detailing an AI model that could automatically learn and improve itself at a fraction of the cost of giants like OpenAI and Meta, that were, until that moment, dominating the AI industry. More ominously for the industry, DeepSeek-R1, the company’s latest large language model, performed as well as that of those behemoths. The company’s mobile app quickly rocketed to the top of many app stores around the world
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