The DeepSeek panic reveals an AI world ready to blow | James Vincent The R1 chatbot has sent the tech world spinning – but this tells us less about China than it does about western neuroses.
The arrival of DeepSeek R1, an AI language model built by the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, has been nothing less than seismic.
The simplest take on R1 is correct: it’s an AI system equal in capability to state-of-the-art US models that was built on a shoestring budget, thus demonstrating Chinese technological prowess.
But the big lesson is perhaps not what DeepSeek R1 reveals about China, but about western neuroses surrounding AI.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 as a subsidiary of the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, which focuses on data-heavy financial analysis – a field that demands similar skills to top-end AI research.
