China copying western tech is nothing new. That’s literally how the elbowed their way up to the top as a world power. They copied everyones homework where they could and said, whatcha going to do about it?
Which is fine in many ways, and if they can improve on technical in the process I don’t really care that much.
But what matters in this case is that actual advancement in AI may require a whole lot of compute, or may not. If DeepSeek is legit, it’s a huge deal. But if they copied OpenAI’s homework, we should at least know about it so we don’t abandon investment in the future of AI.
All of that is a separate conversation on whether or not AI itself is something we should care about or prioritize.
China copying western tech is nothing new. That’s literally how the elbowed their way up to the top as a world power. They copied everyones homework where they could and said, whatcha going to do about it?
Which is fine in many ways, and if they can improve on technical in the process I don’t really care that much.
But what matters in this case is that actual advancement in AI may require a whole lot of compute, or may not. If DeepSeek is legit, it’s a huge deal. But if they copied OpenAI’s homework, we should at least know about it so we don’t abandon investment in the future of AI.
All of that is a separate conversation on whether or not AI itself is something we should care about or prioritize.