DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough ‘is biggest shock to come out of China in 185 years’

Leading scientist Rao Yi argues that the significance of the tech’s challenge to US dominance lies in ‘how surprising it was to the world’

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DeepSeek’s announcement sent shockwaves through US tech firms and stock markets. Photo: Dreamstime/TNS

Published: 8:00pm, 5 Feb 2025

DeepSeek may prove to be China’s most important technological contribution to the world in almost two centuries, according to a leading scientist.

Rao Yi, the president of Capital Medical University in Beijing, argued in a post on social media: “DeepSeek is the biggest shock to human society to come out of China in terms of science and technology in 185 years.

“It’s not that China’s technological achievements in the past were unimportant, but that the real-world reaction triggered by the out-of-the-blue DeepSeek [was much stronger].”

Rao also alluded to China’s defeat at the hands of the British in the first opium war in 1842, which ended China’s self-perceived leadership of the world and exposed how it had fallen behind in military technology.

DeepSeek recently made global headlines with the release of two large language models (LLMs) V3 and R1, which were built at a fraction of the cost and computing power of leading US products such as ChatGPT but performed at a similar level.

OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman admitted it was an “impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price”.