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Recent headlines about China’s DeepSeek AI model have sparked intense debate about America’s technological leadership. This Chinese startup claims to have developed an AI system comparable to leading models like ChatGPT and Gemini, but at a fraction of the cost and with fewer resources.
The company announced its DeepSeek-V3 model in January, stating it required only $6 million in computing power and roughly 2,000 Nvidia chips, compared to the 16,000 chips typically used by major AI companies. According to The New York Times, initial benchmark tests showed promising results in various tasks.
China's only good AI model is not DeepSeek.
There are TEN top tier models all trained from scratch (equal to or better than Europe / Mistral's biggest model).
The US has only 5 labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI—playing at this scale.
The AI race is very much on. pic.twitter.com/ZTxgjDfjEr
— Deedy (@deedydas) January 30, 2025
“The DeepSeek chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems and wrote its own computer programs as capably as anything already on the market, according to the benchmark tests that American A.I. companies have been using,” the Times reported.
However, experts have raised significant doubts about these claims. Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, told Al Jazeera: “It’s very much an open question whether DeepSeek’s claims can be taken at face value. The AI community will be digging into them, and we’ll find out.”
Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR founder, strongly criticized the claims, suggesting they were part of a broader misinformation campaign. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis acknowledged it as China’s best AI work but emphasized that it offered no technological breakthroughs.
“I am shocked” — Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.
In spite of brutal American sanctions, China has caught up with or surpassed the US in many areas of AI.
Consider these two examples of Tencent and DeepSeek:
🔹Tencent has released a language model called Hunyuan-Large that… pic.twitter.com/ILyZVHnE6A
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) January 10, 2025
Technical analysts note that Chinese language models typically target simpler applications requiring less computational power. The Harvard Business Review pointed out that “Chinese LLMs rely on less advanced hardware and initially focus on lower end — more specific, less general-purpose — applications that require less computational power.”
Questions persist about DeepSeek’s funding sources, potential CCP connections, and access to restricted technology. The company’s sudden emergence has surprised both American and Chinese tech communities, with The Times of London noting that before December 2024, DeepSeek was barely known in China’s AI sector.
In response, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate Biden-era AI regulations deemed unnecessarily restrictive. While DeepSeek’s emergence serves as a reminder of China’s technological ambitions, experts suggest it may not represent the watershed moment some have claimed.
