FOr once, Donald Trump was not guilty of hyperbole. The arrival of a small budget Chinese chatbot called Deepseek for Rival Chatgpt is really a awakening. It is an alarm clock to the giants of American technology. It’s an awakening to Wall Street. This is an alarm clock to any developed nation wishing to enter the AI breed.
All this is true even if it turns out that Deepseek is not all that is cracked. If this is the real business, the Chinese have created a premium quality AI product which is freely available and at a small cost. It’s something. In 1957, the United States was amazed when the Soviet Union became the first country to launch an artificial satellite. He was also surprised by the arrival of Deepseek. It would really be a spoutnik moment.
To be sure, there is Those who question The question of whether a Chinese startup can achieve a finish on what American technological companies have been forced to spend billions of dollars. Their doubts can be correct, but that does not affect the overview: the threat of China to Western technological domination is real. The Rush to the AI race will be just as competitive – and perhaps even more – than the space race of the 1950s and 60s. China has a larger economic weight than the Soviet Union.
At the start of its rapid economic development, China was considered the place where American and European companies could outsource production. The workforce was cheap and the moving offshore manufacturing held the promise of higher profits. The idea was that all really advanced things – product design, research and development – would be done in the West. It would only be the assembly work that would end at Guangdong. Creativity had to offer new ideas and new products would be suffocated by the Chinese Marxist-Leninist system.
It turned out to be a too complacent point of view. In 2023, China Put more patents that the rest of the world assembled. Chinese universities are on average more than 6,000 doctoral students In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) one month – more than double the number in the United States. As Deepseek shows, China has an increasing frame of very brilliant people who are quite capable of leaving the beaten track when they are allowed to do so, as has certainly been the case with the development of AI, batteries Lithium-ion and electric vehicles.
The United States is aware of the threat to its hegemony, and the determination of slowing down the economic force of China is a bipartite problem in Washington. The prices on Chinese imports in the United States imposed by Trump during his first mandate were held in place – and added to – By Joe Biden when he became president. A week before leaving his duties, Biden imposed New restrictions When exporting the computer flea developed by the United States to prevent countries such as China with access to advanced technology. The Biden Inflation Reduction Act has offered subsidies to encourage friendly climatic products in the United States.
In some sectors, it can be too late. China is already the largest exporter of electric vehicles, causing protective prices in the United States and the EU. Lithium-ion batteries produced by Chinese factories seventh By kWh of what they did 10 years ago. He should not have surprised the United States and other Western countries than a world division of labor, in which they have done all the growing under low-cost, would have only a limited call to the Chinese. Instead, China has made a concerted attempt to continue to produce shoes, toys and televisions while moving to high -level sectors.
The strategy can have its limits. There is an argument that the economic model of China will eventually become incompatible with its political model and that requests for democracy will force the Communist Party to become less repressive. China is not without economic problems either. Many of his public companies operate at a loss. Bulle on the real estate market Beautiful and really burst.
Despite this, it is clear that the battle for the supremacy of AI accumulates. Trump thinks that a competition from China is not a bad thing for the American technological sector, and is right. The action values of technological actions at Wall Street took a fall after the breaking of the Deepseek news because it questioned if the massive investment in American companies was worth it, but the availability of models to lower cost will accelerate the use of AI. Although there are clearly risks – for confidentiality, security and jobs – there are also potential advantages.
Keir Starmer says that he wants Great Britain to be a “superpower of the AI” and that achieving this objective should become easier as the cost of development decreases. But talking is cheap. The Chinese hi-tech sectors have not only appeared as if by magic, and it is not an accident that it granted the market in electric budgetary vehicles. Like the other countries of Eastern Asia before, China has taken a strategic vision of the industries in which it wanted to be competitive, invested massively to establish them, protected them when they were in their infancy and patiently waited for the results. There was no obstinate belief in market forces, and there was no aversion to choose the winners. The contrast to the United Kingdom could not be more austere.
