Investors believed DeepSeek’s achievement meant China would no longer need so many American chips; that US supremacy in AI was under threat or already over; and that the Silicon Valley giants, who had only a week earlier announced a $500bn AI investment plan, were spending much more money than they needed.
In the biggest week for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, DeepSeek’s app, with its jaunty blue whale logo, became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s app stores in the US and UK as people rushed to find out what it was about.
The firm published a 22-page paper unveiling the DeepSeek R1 model, boasting of “powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviours” and saying it is comparable to Open AI’s 01 model, and even better in some areas.
Liang was said to be on holiday for lunar new year as his team’s creation upended not just markets, but also the geopolitical calculus between the US and China as they vie for supremacy in AI with all its economic, political and military potentials.
And given AI is widely considered to now be one of the main playing fields of geopolitical competition, where did this leave US hopes of maintaining supremacy by suppressing China’s progress with export bans on microchips that are key to progress?.
