Is DeepSeek’s Emergence The Wake-up Call For America’s Qwn SPUTNIK MOMENT?
According to The New York Times, U.S. President Donald Trump remarked that DeepSeek should 'sound the alarm for our industry—we need to focus on winning the competition.
Trump added that he has been 'reading about China and its companies, particularly one that introduced a faster, more cost-effective AI approach. This is great because it saves money. I see this as a positive development, a real asset.
According to the Financial Times, the launch of a Chinese AI triggered a $1 trillion plunge in the major U.S. tech stock indices, marking the beginning of the AI supremacy race. An investor described it as the “SPUTNIK MOMENT” for the world’s AI superpowers. The Financial Times reports that DeepSeek is a formidable competitor to OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool, with its emergence shaking confidence in the U.S. AI boom, as it appears that China can achieve the same performance with fewer resources.
On 28th January, due to Wall Street’s collapse, Japanese tech companies linked to the AI sector saw a second consecutive day of losses. Advantest plummeted by more than 9%, while tech investor SoftBank dropped over 5%, following a loss of 8% the previous day.
However, most other Asian markets saw a general rise. Meanwhile, DeepSeek faced a cyberattack on Monday, forcing the platform to temporarily limit new registrations. The company stated on its status page that it began investigating the issue late Monday night, Beijing time. After about two hours of monitoring, DeepSeek confirmed it was the victim of a 'large-scale malicious attack.' While new user registrations were restricted, existing users were still able to log in as usual.
According to The Guardian, DeepSeek utilized fewer chips than its competitors in developing its model, resulting in lower production costs. This has raised questions about the recent 'spending spree' by U.S. companies. Despite being unable to access America’s most advanced technologies, DeepSeek successfully built an advanced AI model, which has sparked concerns about the effectiveness of Washington's efforts to curb China's high-tech industry.
A Renowned American venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, compared the release of DeepSeek's R1 model to a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Soviet space race, posting on X that it marks the SPUTNIK MOMENT for artificial intelligence.
According to DeepSeek, its R1 model outperforms OpenAI's O1-mini model across 'various benchmarks,' while research by ArtificialAnalysis suggests it surpasses the overall quality of models developed by Google, Meta, and Anthropic.