Can America Win the AI War with China?
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From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then, out of nowhere, a totally unknown Chinese startup turned the American stock market and that assumption on its head.
Yeah, John, we've got a bit of a tech sell-off this morning, and it's being caused by earth-shattering developments in the AI space. So let's take a look at this. Did you see the Dow? Down more than 140 points. On track for one of its worst days in the past two years. And here's why.
DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products.
Let's talk about DeepSeek because it is mind-blowing and it is shaking this entire industry to its core.
And they did it despite America's prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China.
Buzz started growing about DeepSeek's latest AI model being more efficient while running on a lot less, a lot less advanced NVIDIA chips. Released last week, it's already being called what is a major breakthrough, as the app shows. It's work, it's reasoning. I mean, this tech route and massive market sell-off, it's a wake-up call. It is for me.
America was caught flat-footed, asking, how did this even happen? And could we actually lose this tech war? Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the word hard drive, don't worry. I have two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, an AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog Marginal Revolution. He is the author of over a dozen books, but frankly, I've lost count. He is joined today by Jeffrey Cain, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future. We talk about how this happened, what it means. Is it a 21st century Sputnik moment? And if so, is China now officially ahead of us in the AI race? Stay with us. Tyler Cowen and Jeffrey Cain, welcome to Honestly.
Happy to be here. Good to be here, Barry.
Okay, the biggest news in the world of AI dropped, at least from my perspective, out of nowhere last week. And that news did not come out of California. It didn't come out of Silicon Valley. It came out of China. Tyler Cowen, tell us about DeepSeek, what it is, and why it matters.
DeepSeek is online. It is free. It is a very fast model. I would say it's the most fun model to speak with. It is more arbitrary and subjective and personality-rich than the other AI models. It's also open source, which means anyone can copy it. So there's no way of stopping it from spreading, even if you shut down that original website somehow. So it's not as good as the best open AI products, but it is changing the world. And it's probably what a lot of the world is going to use.
You seem to have been using DeepSeek before it was even a headline in the news. Did you somehow get early access to this product?
No, I was using it before the R1 update came out. But I'm in a lot of chat groups. And if there's something new in the world of AI, odds are I'm going to hear about it. So I was just playing around with it. And it was so much fun. I kept on going.
When I wrote you about it, here's what you emailed me back. DeepSeek is not so PC like the American programs, though, of course, it is packed with Chinese restrictions, which we'll talk about in a second. But it's really fun to chat with, has lots of personality, a kind of Barry Weiss LLM. I guess I should be flattered by that. But tell me about the personality and tell me a little bit about the restrictions.
Well, it will take on any personality you tell it to, which is part of the fun. But the default is simply that it's charming. It's more poetic. It writes better fiction, probably, than the American models. It's just a whole different vibe, you could say. Now, if you try to ask it questions about Chinese politics, Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs, it either A, won't answer, or sometimes it starts to answer A, And then the cursor starts moving backwards and it erases whatever it wrote down. And a very literal act of Orwellian censorship.
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