Vivian Wang

But I think when we think about safety testing in the West, right, it's making sure that the chatbot is not feeding its users answers that might push them to self-harm or, you know, feeding hate speech.

In China, there is that element, but there is also the element of making sure that it doesn't provide answers about politically sensitive questions like the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square or about China's top leaders that the government might not want Chinese people asking.

Yeah, and this is a tension that exists in China's entire economic development, where the government knows that to allow its economy to flourish, it needs openness, it needs interaction with the rest of the world.

But of course, it also wants that interaction to happen on its own terms and within its own control.

So that tension is just even more pronounced when it comes to AI.

Hmm.

And so they are trying to maintain that balance, trying to figure out how that works.

And then in early 2025, along comes DeepSeek.

So DeepSeek was a chatbot created by a Chinese startup that really no one had heard of before last year.

And it performed basically just as well as leading models in the United States.

DeepSeek says that their AI model only cost $5.6 million.

But according to the company's founders, it had been trained for so much cheaper.

It was open source.

And to have the Chinese actually open sourcing it, meaning that that is going to be what goes around the world.

And it was this wake-up call and this sign to everybody around the world that Chinese AI could compete with Silicon Valley.

And for all of China and the Chinese government in particular, this is also a moment of huge national pride.

Soon after DeepSeek's release, Xi Jinping actually called a meeting of a bunch of business leaders, including the founder of DeepSeek, who's just a guy in his 30s, again, who most people have never heard of before this point.

And Xi tells the entrepreneurs there, go out and show your talents and serve the country.

And this is seen as a really important signal that the government recognized that it needed to give companies a little bit more space if it really wanted them to be on the cutting edge.

And so I think what it's essentially trying to do here is have its cake and eat it too.