The cost of China’s ‘low-cost’ AI
The emergence of DeepSeek forces us to question the American approach to this technology and the investments it requires
Monday, January 27, will go down as a turning point in the history of the technology race to dominate artificial intelligence, forcing us to rethink much of what industry and governments have taken for granted in recent years. The emergence of the latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model available for free on the internet and developed in China, shook up the markets and underscored the stratospheric valuation of some American tech companies. DeepSeek offers users basically the same thing as ChatGPT, made by the American company OpenAI, but it has been built at a minimal cost by comparison. It is not just about competition for a good and inexpensive product. The West is facing a potential global invasion by a tool that questions the established business path and aspires to have access to global data with an unprecedented capacity to use it.
