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China’s superpower of scaling will spur DeepSeek’s competitive threat
The Chinese AI start-up should worry Silicon Valley and investors betting on US exceptionalism.
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DeepSeek has plenty of opportunities to optimise usage through application in China’s techno-industrial cluster.
PHOTO: AFP
Yanmei Xie
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Stripping away the hype around DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up’s achievement can sound almost mundane. It leveraged known engineering tricks to create products nearly as good as top US models – just much cheaper, though not as cheap as some of the jaw-dropping estimates of its costs. DeepSeek is not a trailblazer yet. It is, however, still a game changer.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei wrote that DeepSeek did not achieve “a unique breakthrough” but rather reached “an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve”. What was unexpected, he said, “is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese”.
