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My Take | China’s AI revolution should promote equality, not just innovation
DeepSeek shows China’s tech strategy is paying off, but Beijing should also push AI education to help close income and opportunity gaps
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The ripples from DeepSeek continue to spread in China, where the government has embraced the tech start-up’s unexpected success by speeding up the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The rise of DeepSeek, developed by home-grown tech talent, is evidence that Beijing’s strategy of pouring resources into training the next generation of innovators over the past decade has worked out.
Apparently encouraged by the AI company’s swift ascent, President Xi Jinping said on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People’s Congress earlier this month that the country’s education system needed changes to better foster science and innovation talent.
Late last year, the State Council, China’s cabinet, said it would create more world-class doctoral programmes in key areas such as medicine, engineering and emerging fields.
But in addition to training experts at universities, the government wants to nurture an AI-savvy generation from the earliest years of school.
The Beijing municipal government announced a week ago that it would introduce AI courses to primary and secondary school pupils starting in September.
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