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OpenAI expects another ‘seismic shock’ from China amid speculation of new DeepSeek release
There is heightened anticipation about a potential major DeepSeek release around the Lunar New Year
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The race between the US and China to dominate the world’s artificial intelligence industry has become “complex and challenging to forecast”, according to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
In a blog post this week, published ahead of the first anniversary of DeepSeek’s release of breakthrough reasoning model R1 on January 20, OpenAI said another “seismic shock” from China could be on the cards, as anticipation heightened about a potential new major release from the Hangzhou-based start-up around the Lunar New Year.
“The US continues to lead on model capabilities, and US models also have maintained a meaningful lead in science and more complex reasoning,” said the post written by OpenAI’s intelligence and investigations team.
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“What has changed more decisively is depth and deployability: China now has a broad field of near-frontier models, many of them open-weight and aggressively priced, making them easier to deploy across industries and government systems.”
That assessment reflected how the export of home-grown technologies formed a major part of Beijing’s AI strategy.
According to OpenAI’s post, open-sourcing AI models “in weeks, rather than months” helped Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba Cloud, drive global adoption and made these products the default systems for many local and overseas developers.
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