I’m conflicted about DeepSeek. On the one hand, everyone wants an underdog to win. The DeepSeek team built an amazing AI, even if the extent of the capital investment and the computing resources remain open to debate. More than a technical victory, it’s a moral one: the project is truly open source, can be deployed natively on a $6,000 PC, and as such is proliferating across the world. Silicon Valley’s brute force GPU model was not only inelegant, but clearly intended to concentrate massive computing power in the hands of the business community and the United States. The implications of DeepSeek are geopolitical, economic but also, moral.
I’m reminded of Sir Tim Berners Lee, who instead of commercializing the world wide web opened it up for all humanity to use. Perhaps the engineers at DeepSeek had similar lofty goals. With more time, I would dive into the Mandarin and Cantonese forums to find out more; just a lot of Pizza Deliveries right now. In either case, the engineers at DeepSeek should be celebrated and congratulated. Anything else is small minded and weak.
So why do I remain conflicted?
Listen, if Google turned around tomorrow with news it had developed the world’s most powerful AGI, I would be concerned. No one is replacing me. Secondly, I do not trust Google with this amount of power and responsibility. I’m not sure I trust most governments with it either. That includes the US, and definitely the UK and the bureaucrats at the European Union.
Over the past decades western ‘freedoms’ have been exposed as illusory. Despite this, some idea of a social contract endures: surveillance is not broadly accepted, citizens are in theory allowed to articulate themselves, and we all get to vote for political parties that are often exactly the same (the ‘uniparty’, or one state establishment). In China many younger people are increasingly happier, better educated and wealthier in real terms than their counterparts in the UK or United States.
Today, China remains a one-party state led by a relatively benign leadership. Tomorrow this could be different. CBDCs could be introduced, new paradigms of surveillance normalized in schools and hospitals, or state-dominated ideologies imposed in new ways, while religion and individual sovereignty are pushed out. There is no correct course, even if the trains run on time.
The US markets will recover from the shock to their sense of inviolability. There will be many more shocks ahead.
Now that China is proving itself a peer in technology, the real question is whether western culture and politics – a technology of government, if you will – can reinvent itself, anew.
For now, congratulations to the DeepSeek team for a historic achievement. “Into the Unknown,” and let the games begin.
