It won’t have escaped your notice that DeepSeek R1, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot released by a private Chinese company at the end of 2024, has attracted enormous attention. Initial headlines focused on its immediate impact on the financial markets as US tech stocks plummeted, with $589 billion wiped from Nvidia’s value on January 27 alone.
But DeepSeek could have broader implications. The chatbot matches the performance of its American competitors, such as ChatGPT, but comes free of charge. This raises the prospect that it might challenge America’s dominance in the field and allow other countries to develop their own cheap ‘sovereign’ AI systems that could bring the economic and societal benefits the technology has long promised but struggled to deliver. DeepSeek also intensifies the technological rivalry between China and the United States and has the potential to drag other countries into that confrontation.
