the new new
world
Inside
China, DeepSeek Provides a National Mic Drop Moment
Social media
exploded in a celebration after the news that a Chinese start-up had made an
artificial intelligence tool that was more efficient than any in the United
States.
Li Yuan
By Li Yuan
Jan. 28,
2025
Updated 1:26
p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/business/deepseek-china-reaction.html
Inside
China, it was called the tipping point for the global technological rivalry
with the United States and the “darkest hour” in Silicon Valley, evoking
Winston Churchill. It was possibly a breakthrough that could change the
country’s destiny.
The news
that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek can build artificial intelligence models
that are as good as OpenAI’s, and at a fraction of the cost, tanked the stock
market on Monday and sent Silicon Valley into a panic.
The claim
about DeepSeek’s success was viewed in China as a shot in the arm for a
discouraged tech industry and a public that’s suffering through a stagnating
economy. On social media posts and state news outlets, DeepSeek was nothing
less than a testament to the country’s ability to innovate, especially when
facing efforts by the United States to limit China’s access to the most
advanced technologies.
“A nation
like China, which is equipped with substantial technological resources, cannot
truly be suppressed,” wrote Hu Xijin, a retired editor in chief of the
Communist Party tabloid Global Times. “U.S. sanctions in one area will only
spur more comprehensive and resilient progress in China, potentially leading to
breakthroughs that outpace the U.S.”
The American
semiconductor policies toward China “may ultimately backfire on the U.S,” he
wrote.
On Monday
evening, four out of the 10 most popular topics on the social media platform
Weibo were related to DeepSeek.
“DeepSeek,
keep up the momentum!” a Weibo user in Beijing wrote.
“The nation
must protect the founder of DeepSeek at all costs! Seriously!” wrote another
user in Shanghai who usually posts about entertainment news.
Even a
hashtag about the DeepSeek chief executive, Liang Wenfeng, visiting his
hometown in southern Guangdong Province for the Lunar New Year, which falls on
Wednesday, was a hot topic on Weibo. It had more than 50 million views.
Much of the
outpouring of attention emphasized the U.S.-China tech rivalry.
The
assumption that the United States would lead the next wave of the technological
revolution was now open to challenge, Li Chengdong, an e-commerce investor,
wrote on his WeChat timeline.
Fancaiju, a
business blog on WeChat, had a post saying that DeepSeek had burst the U.S.
stock bubble in one fell swoop — a more significant strike than when George
Soros bet against the British pound in 1992.
The DeepSeek
breakthrough had turned the $100 billion A.I. initiative known as Stargate that
President Trump announced last week into “Interstellar Graveyard,” said a post
on Fancaiju.
The
commentariat took immense pride that DeepSeek was stocked with talented Chinese
technologists educated in China.
DeepSeek
dispelled the myth of the dominance of American A.I. talent and demystified
companies like OpenAI, said Tom Zhang, a human resources expert who has worked
at several big tech companies in Silicon Valley. “A group of ‘homegrown Ph.D.
graduates’ from Tsinghua and Peking University outshines their counterparts
from Stanford and MIT,” he wrote on his WeChat timeline.
Entrepreneurs
and investors said that DeepSeek demonstrated that China’s A.I. sector had an
edge in innovation. They also said they believed that the U.S. government’s
export restrictions on specialized chips from the Silicon Valley tech giant
Nvidia forced Chinese companies to be more efficient.
That was not
what Washington had intended, people in China said, but that was what happened.
DeepSeek
trained its A.I. chatbot with 2,000 specialized Nvidia chips, compared with as
many as the 16,000 chips used by leading American counterparts. It’s also not
the only Chinese company to prove the efficiency of its engineering: 01.ai, a
startup founded by Kaifu Lee, a Beijing investor and entrepreneur, trained its
A.I. models with computing power that cost about $3 million, the company said,
compared with the $80 to $100 million OpenAI has tapped.
“In my book
AI Superpowers, I predicted that US will lead breakthroughs, but China will be
better and faster in engineering,” Mr. Lee, who studied artificial intelligence
at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, wrote on X on Sunday. “With the recent
DeepSeek releases, I feel vindicated.”
Among the
most popular articles on the Chinese internet were two interviews of Mr. Liang,
the reclusive chief executive, with a tech blog.
In the
interviews, Mr. Liang, who founded a quantitative stock trading firm called
High-Flyer after graduating with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence,
came across as a geeky billionaire full of idealism and optimism. He started
DeepSeek as a side project in 2023 because he wanted to explore the limits of
A.I., he said.
Mr. Liang
said he believed that innovation was, first and foremost, a matter of belief.
“Why is
Silicon Valley so innovative? It starts with daring to try,” he said. Mr. Liang
noted that when OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out, China was suffering from a lack of
confidence to pursue such innovation. “From investors to major tech companies,
many felt the gap was too wide,” he said.
As China’s
economy develops, he said, China should gradually become a contributor to tech
innovation, rather than a follower.
He said he
believed that China’s economic slowdown wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because
it could force company founders to be driven less by financial success.
“When many
people realize that making quick money in the past was likely due to the luck
of the times,” Mr. Liang said, “they will become more willing to focus on
genuine innovation.”
Mr. Liang
told the blog that he had hired mostly young graduates or even graduate
students with little work experience. Every team member who worked on an A.I.
model that was released last spring graduated from a Chinese university, he
said.
“The top 50
talents might not currently be in China, but perhaps we can cultivate such
talent ourselves,” he said, a quote that has been reposted many times. People
on social media portrayed DeepSeek employees as geniuses, posting their names
and citing their educational background and academic papers.
Mr. Liang,
born in 1985, didn’t attract much public attention until last week when he
joined a group of businesspeople and academics for a meeting with Li Qiang,
China’s premier.
The meeting
was a sign that Mr. Liang had risen to the top, but it could also put him in an
awkward position, tech executives said. The relationship between Chinese
entrepreneurs and the government has been tricky after Beijing’s crackdown on
the tech sector in recent years. The government wants the companies to help
make China a tech power less reliant on the United States. But it’s also wary
of the companies’ influence. The crackdown crushed the promise of the Chinese
internet.
A Hong Kong
investor told me that he would not invest in Chinese internet stocks as long as
Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, was in office — even with the DeepSeek
breakthrough. Mr. Xi is known for his dislike of the internet sector.
Business
executives hope the government can refrain from interfering with DeepSeek.
“As is often
the case with this government,” Zhang Fuyu, an entrepreneur, wrote on WeChat,
“any promising company gets incorporated into a national strategy — receiving
funding and resources but being subjected to state directives — or is directly
placed under control, then DeepSeek’s future prospects may be entirely
stifled.”
Under
government regulations, A.I. models that serve consumers are subject to
censorship rules. Many DeepSeek users posted photos and videos of its chatbot
censoring topics including Xi Jinping, the war in Ukraine, the Cultural
Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“If DeepSeek
is truly as remarkable as claimed, so impactful that it shakes the U.S. stock
market, yet it remains confined to being just an AI model with Chinese
socialist characteristics,” a journalist using the handle Xiaoming wrote on her
Threads account, “then that would be truly tragic.”
Li Yuan
writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on
the world by examining its businesses, politics and society. More about Li Yuan
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