The USA's agenda to dominate AI is being taken to the cleaners. DeepSeek has thrown a spanner into the works of all the USA AI investors such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and many others, whose investments were said to run into hundreds of billions. Nvidia will be hard hit, given the wake-up call that AI development does not need solely to depend on high-end GPU chips that it monopolizes.
The USA's restriction on Nvidia's sale of high-end chips to China is now becoming an exercise in futility. DeepSeek was able to come up, within such a short span of time, just leveraging on lesser high-end chips, to have a system that trounced these USA companies in terms of performance on most parameters, except the amount of money they poured in over many years.
DeepSeek was able to outperform the multi-billion conglomerates of the USA with a budget of just US$5.5 million funded by Chinese hedge fund HighFlyer. And the most nerve-wracking thought for its competitors was that DeepSeek was started just in 2023, by Liang Wenfeng, a former hedge fund manager. How did such a late starter in the AI business managed to rise so fast is really shocking.
The most surprising discovery was that most of DeepSeek's scientists were young graduates culled from Beijing, Tsinghua and Beihang Universities as disclosed by Nury Vittachi on his site 'Fridayeveryday'. Talk about new nerds, thinking out of the box, does really promote better thinking and innovation than relying on the same old nerds of old.
Now the USA is trying to promote the narrative that DeepSeek is a dangerous competitor, by giving free usage for the rest of the world and not capitalizing on its commercial gain. Just imagine that by saying giving others the free gift is a dangerous thing. We can expect more negative attack on DeepSeek as the days go by, even using the same template that anything from China is junk. Well, let the USA and the West still continue with their superiority complex thinking and suffer the indignity when the shit hits the fan. We have seen it in space stations, high-speed rails, EVs, batteries, jet engines, shipbuilding and now testing the boundaries of AI. Bet against China all they want, but China has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Anonymous
2 comments:
Kevin Walmsley on his site 'Inside China Business' said that the USA is using the same system that it employed all along, avoiding the challenge from China and others, just by banning where it could not compete or enacting laws to punish them like against Toshiba of Japan and Alstom of France. How could such a country ever hope to progress under such fear of competing.
The USA banned Huawei, being unable to compete against Huawei in the telecommunication sector and had a horrid time trying to develop 5G. Understand the USA is leapfrogging the competition by jumping into 7G if I am not mistaken. Trying to move from 4G to 5G is already a difficult hurdle for it to accomplish and yet trying to scare Huawei with its 7G bullshitting?
The USA is trying to prevent Chinese EVs entering the USA market. The USA automakers cannot build cars for under US$50,000. China can build them for US$15,000 or even less. The USA tried to stop Chinese automakers from taking over the USA market, using tariffs. The USA knows it cannot produce cheap cars like China, with wage cost, raw material cost and energy cost way above those in China. Moreover, the USA knows it is lagging behind EV technology and have to depend on Chinese batteries for those EVs. And yet the USA is gloating about luring manufacturing back without considering how those manufacturing entities are going to compete outside the USA.
The USA now finds itself competing against its peers in the AI industry, not as an outright leader. USA investors have poured in hundreds of billions into AI research and development, all to be blindsided by a two-year old upstart called DeepSeek. The biggest shock of all must be DeepSeek making it free to use of its app that terrified USA developers like OpenAI, Microsoft and Amazon among others. Users of the systems developed by the latter three companies have to pay a fee monthly, and DeepSeek is taking away their breakfast, lunch and dinner by throwing free meals to those users. This will render all the investments that they threw in into a wasted effort and they will not tolerate that lying down. And so, they are calling the USA administration to enact legislation to ban DeepSeek in the USA. Already, some doggies are jumping the gun by moving against DeepSeek. So, instead of taking up the challenge, banning is the template of the USA where it cannot compete. How can there be real innovation in the face of such behavior, burying heads in the sand?
Not to worry. Those manufacturing being lured back to USA can just do one thing - Make in USA, by the USA and for the USA. Ego inflated; problem solved.
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