By Mayank Chhaya-
The dramatic emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app DeepSeek is threatening to cut deep into America’s quest for supremacy over the AI world. It has also set a cat among pigeons as far as President Donald Trump’s hugely ambitious $500 billion AI data center project is concerned.
It was less than a week ago that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison were at the White House along with Trump to announce the project named Stargate.
However, the spectacular entry of DeepSeek from China is already forcing U.S. tech leaders on the defensive with the stocks of tech giants such as Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia dropping on Monday because of a frenzied sell-off.
Powered by opensource DeepSeek-V3 model was said to have been developed spending less than $6 million and 200 employees compared to billions that U.S. companies have invested and tens of thousands of employees. The fact that it has risen in the face of the U.S. restricting the sale of advanced chip technology to China makes it even more worrisome for American companies.
There are already those who wonder whether in the aftermath of DeepSeek’s rise, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would feel confident spending $80 billion as part of the project.
Those who have used DeepSeek offer unqualified praise for the app saying it is much better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Reports out of China suggested that buffeted by the restrictions on advanced chips, Chinese developers have found a way to optimize the efficiency of the existing ones and by sharing their work with each other. It is clear that China considers AI as the new frontier on which to beat the U.S., reminiscent of the race for space between the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen has called the rise of DeepSeek AI’s “Sputnik moment”, Sputnik being the satellite that the Soviet Union launched in the late 1950s igniting a space race.
“Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world,” he said.
The tech stock sell-off on Monday was attributed to DeepSeek overtaking its U.S. rival ChatGPT in terms of downloads on the Apple Store.
It is still early days, but it would not be long before people begin to express worries about DeepSeek’s Chinese origin similar to what TikTok is facing in terms of the safety of user data. However, what distinguishes DeepSeek is that it is opensource and allows users to customize it unlike TikTok.
It is noteworthy that despite the overwhelming presence of Indian American CEOs in the U.S. tech world, India as a country barely figures in the story about AI advances. This is in sharp contrast to the way China has latched on to it as a collective national challenge and obsession.
