China’s DeepSeek is redefining AI tech. Here’s why the US must get on board

Name: Chinese AI disrupter DeepSeek claims top spot in US App Store, dethroning ChatGPT
Uploaded: 2025-01-29T14:30:08.000Z
Duration: 5 min 10 s
Description: Chinese AI disrupter DeepSeek claims top spot in US App Store, dethroning ChatGPT

DeepSeek shows that hi-tech ‘is not all about scale and money’, one analyst says, as another calls China’s innovative march ‘unstoppable’

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

99+

Meteoric arrival of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model is seen to highlight the need for US-China cooperation on innovation, despite Washington’s policy to contain Beijing’s hi-tech progress. Photo: Shutterstock

Meredith Chen

Published: 10:30pm, 29 Jan 2025

China’s DeepSeek has reshaped the pathways to hi-tech breakthroughs and shown how talent and software integration can be more powerful than scale, money or a “copycat” approach, according to observers.

The meteoric arrival of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model also highlighted the need for US-China cooperation on innovation, despite Washington’s “small yard, high fence” policy to contain Beijing’s hi-tech progress, they said.

DeepSeek, a start-up based in eastern China, rolled out its open-source R1 large language model on January 20. It has taken the tech world by storm – with a performance challenging the dominance of American tech giants like OpenAI but built at a fraction of the cost.

05:10

Chinese AI disrupter DeepSeek claims top spot in US App Store, dethroning ChatGPT

Denis Simon, non-resident fellow at the US think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the most important lesson for the West here was that “there were many paths to the same innovation target”, as DeepSeek had followed an innovative approach to push “the frontier of the current thinking about AI technology”.

“By developing a lower cost, more efficient, and perhaps even more effective path to producing ‘artificial general intelligence’, DeepSeek has shown that it’s not all about scale and money,” Simon said.

“In fact, it is about cultivating talent and thinking more about software integration than it is about accumulating thousands and thousands of advanced chips.”

In December, DeepSeek released an earlier large language model – the V3. According to the firm, V3 was built at a fraction of the cost and computing power that major US tech companies draw on to build their large language models or LLMs – the technology behind generative AI services like ChatGPT.

DeepSeek is also seen as exposing the limitations of the US containment strategy, with sanctions blocking Chinese firms’ access to advanced semiconductors used for training LLMs.