What Is the Bottom Line for DeepSeek?

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When Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its powerful new A.I. model, Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor, went so far as to as “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” Presumably, Mr. Andreessen wasn’t calling on the federal government to start a massive new program like NASA, which was our response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch; he wants the U.S. government to flood private industry with capital, to ensure that America remains technologically and economically dominant.

As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.

Although it’s unclear precisely how much more efficient DeepSeek’s models are than, say, ChatGPT, its innovations are real and undermine a core argument that America’s dominant technology firms have been pushing — namely, that they are developing the best artificial intelligence technology the world has to offer, and that technological advances can be achieved only with enormous investment — in computing power, energy generation and cutting-edge chips. For years now, these companies have been arguing that the government must protect them from competition to ensure that America stays ahead.

But let’s not forget that America’s tech giants are awash in cash, computing power and data capacity. They are headquartered in the world’s strongest economy and enjoy the advantages conferred by the rule of law and a free enterprise system. And yet, despite all those advantages — as well as a U.S. government ban on the sales of cutting-edge chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese firms — America’s tech giants have seemingly been challenged on the cheap.

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.

Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment — resistance sympathizers, social justice warriors, MAGA enthusiasts — than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies.

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