DeepSeek's 'Surprising' AI Claims Show China 'Starting to Gain an Edge'

America's competitive edge has long relied on open science and collaboration across industry, academia and government,

Schmidt wrote

We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases. But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research road map and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission."

Altman, whose flagship product ChatGPT is described by DeepSeek as a "rival," said in a statement

I've been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with a faster method of AI and much less expensive method, and that's good because you don't have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset."

President Donald Trump said on Monday

DeepSeek's cost efficiency is praiseworthy, but the privacy implications of its data collection would raise significant concerns,

said Saeed Rehman, senior lecturer in cybersecurity and networking at Flinders University

[A ... A kid] might touch a hot plate, get burned, and quickly learn not to do it again,

Katanforoosh said via text

For AI, I think this just shows us that [the United States] is not alone in our technical capability,

Casado said in an interview

R1 has given me a lot more confidence in the pace of progress staying high,

said Nathan Lambert, a researcher at Ai2, in an interview with TechCrunch

It is interesting that this breakthrough was achieved not by government-backed research institutes and large [state-owned enterprises], but by a hedge fund with no government subsidies,

noted Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of AI labs have war rooms going on right now,

said Robert Nishihara, the co-founder of AI infrastructure startup Anyscale, in an interview with TechCrunch

Of course [DeepSeek] was over-hyped,

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, an assistant professor at NYU’s Center for Data Science, told TechCrunch

DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,

said a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen in a post on X, referencing the launch of the Soviet Union’s Earth-orbiting spacecraft decades ago that pushed the U.S. to seriously invest in its space program

This situation may evoke similar concerns to those raised for TikTok, where data privacy and security have been hotly debated,

he added

To be clear, they're not a way to duck the competition between the US and China,

Amodei wrote

In interviews they've done, they seem like smart, curious researchers who just want to make useful technology,

Amodei wrote, about DeepSeek