Matteo Wong writes:

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Indeed, the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open. Unlike top American AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—which keep their research almost entirely under wraps, DeepSeek has made the program’s final code, as well as an in-depth technical explanation of the program, free to view, download, and modify. In other words, anybody from any country, including the U.S., can use, adapt, and even improve upon the program. That openness makes DeepSeek a boon for American start-ups and researchers—and an even bigger threat to the top U.S. companies, as well as the government’s national-security interests. [Continue reading…]