Steve Hsu

So if you follow AI in China,

They had a list of national champions, which were the usual suspects, you know, like ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, you know, companies that... The kind of things a huge bureaucracy would be able to identify.

Right.

Companies that were already leading internet companies that had an AI lab and...

they were doing their thing.

And by the way, one thing that's escaped attention in the West is a lot of the models produced by those companies that I listed are also competitive with open AI.

So it's not just one deep-seek model coming out of China.

It's a handful of models that are at the frontier.

But

Prior to the DeepSeek moment, DeepSeek, if you recall, was a quant hedge fund, which turned its attention to AI research because the founder, Liang, is a true believer.

He really wants to build AGI.

I have an interview on my podcast, which I'm going to release probably in the next month,

with a researcher who used to be at DeepSeek.

And his view, knowing all the people there, is that, especially Liang, is deeply committed to open source.

And he just views it as the right way to advance the ecosystem.

And Sam Altman, whom I also know, has also said the same thing.

So remember, he says that the closed source is on the wrong side of history.

We really want to get to the point where we can

release open source stuff.

They've now stated their intention to do so.