Let’s talk about DeepSeek. If you haven’t been following, it’s a Chinese AI startup that just launched a model called R1. It’s fast, smart, and cheap. Trained for $6 million. That’s lunch money compared to what OpenAI reportedly spends.
This thing shot to the top of the App Store, tanked Nvidia’s market value by hundreds of billions (yes, billions), and triggered panic in US tech circles. Even Trump called it a “wake-up call.”
DeepSeek did it using a bunch of A100 chips they stockpiled before US export bans kicked in, mixed with lower-end hardware. It works. Which raises the question: have we been overengineering this whole Large Language Model thing?
There’s also a political angle, obviously. The app dodges anything Beijing wouldn’t like, and countries like Australia and Italy have already banned it over data privacy concerns. Fair enough. But that hasn’t stopped people from downloading it in droves. And that’s where things get uncomfortable for US firms. DeepSeek’s success kind of pokes a hole in the idea that only Western companies can lead AI innovation. Suddenly, “built in China” doesn’t mean second-best. It might mean faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
So what now? Do you care that an AI model comes out of Beijing instead of San Francisco? Are you cool with censorship if the tech is better? Would you actually switch to a non-Western chatbot if it runs faster and costs less? Is this a one-off win, or are we seeing the start of a real shift in who controls AI’s future?
Let’s hear it.
This thing shot to the top of the App Store, tanked Nvidia’s market value by hundreds of billions (yes, billions), and triggered panic in US tech circles. Even Trump called it a “wake-up call.”
DeepSeek did it using a bunch of A100 chips they stockpiled before US export bans kicked in, mixed with lower-end hardware. It works. Which raises the question: have we been overengineering this whole Large Language Model thing?
There’s also a political angle, obviously. The app dodges anything Beijing wouldn’t like, and countries like Australia and Italy have already banned it over data privacy concerns. Fair enough. But that hasn’t stopped people from downloading it in droves. And that’s where things get uncomfortable for US firms. DeepSeek’s success kind of pokes a hole in the idea that only Western companies can lead AI innovation. Suddenly, “built in China” doesn’t mean second-best. It might mean faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
So what now? Do you care that an AI model comes out of Beijing instead of San Francisco? Are you cool with censorship if the tech is better? Would you actually switch to a non-Western chatbot if it runs faster and costs less? Is this a one-off win, or are we seeing the start of a real shift in who controls AI’s future?
Let’s hear it.