Editorial | DeepSeek showcases China’s great strides in nurturing AI talent
The United States will soon learn that it is really the brains, not the machines, who will in the end decide the winners and losers in tech war
A tech war is ultimately a talent war. By that metric, China may already have pulled ahead of the United States. Washington’s “small yard, high fence” strategy of restricting access to advanced semiconductors and other key technologies may have a short-term impact. However, it is really the brains, not the machines, who will in the end decide the winners and losers.
That is one reason the release of China’s DeepSeek, an open-sourced artificial intelligence (AI) platform, has been a shot across the bow in the US. The 180-plus members who made up the Chinese AI team were almost entirely educated at the country’s top universities and research institutes. That is no accident.
For those who have been paying attention, China in the past decade has been training AI talent like there is no tomorrow.
Some 2,000 undergraduate AI programmes have been created, of which more than 300 are at the country’s most elite universities and research institutions.
As a result, China has produced almost half of the world’s AI researchers, compared with 18 per cent from the US. Four years ago, it was about one-third while the figure in the US remained almost unchanged.
That is according to a survey by MacroPolo, a think-tank of the Paulson Institute named after former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson. During the same period, the US dropped from hosting about 59 per cent of the world’s top AI talent – at academic institutions and commercial entities – to 42 per cent.
