A new AI assitant from China has Silicon Valley talking

It’s ignited a heated debate in American tech circles: How did a small Chinese company so dramatically surpass the best-funded players in the AI industry? And what does this mean for the field going forward?

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun wrote in a Threads post that this development doesn’t mean China is “surpassing the US in AI,” but rather serves as evidence that “open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.” He added that DeepSeek benefited from other open-weight models, including some of Meta’s.

“They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it,” LeCun wrote. “That is the power of open research and open source.”

(Although many companies, including DeepSeek and Meta, claim their AI models are open source, they have not actually revealed their training data to the public.)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also appeared to take a jab at DeepSeek last month, after some users noticed that V3 would occasionally confuse itself with ChatGPT. A day after V3’s release, Altman wrote on X that “it is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works. it is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don’t know if it will work.”

Some figures online floated unsubstantiated claims that DeepSeek’s success is a Chinese government “psyop,” or psychological operation, casting suspicion on the small team’s ability to “beat all of the top researchers in the world as a side project.”

Soumith Chintala, cofounder of PyTorch, the machine learning library developed by Meta AI, was among many this weekend who hit back at these allegations.

“i’m comically impressed that people are coping on deepseek by spewing bizarre conspiracy theories — despite deepseek open-sourcing and writing some of the most detail oriented papers ever,” Chintala posted on X. “read. replicate. compete. don’t be salty, just makes you look incompetent.”

Others in the tech and investment spheres joined in on the praise, expressing excitement about the implications of DeepSeek’s success.

“This is what makes the DeepSeek thing so funny. A bunch of grifters have been selling AI secret sauce for years — spooky mystery juice that could never be fully explained,” macroeconomist Philip Pilkington wrote on X. “Now a bunch of young guys just wrote a good algo, published it, and the circus tent burned down.”

Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Github, similarly posted: “The deepseek team is obviously really good. China is full of talented engineers. Every other take is cope. Sorry.”

DeepSeek’s models tout bilingual proficiency, excelling in both Chinese and English. They do, however, appear subject to censorship or specific political leanings around topics deemed sensitive in China.

When asked about the sovereignty of Taiwan, a self-ruling island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory, DeepSeek’s R1 sometimes states the subject is “beyond my current scope.” Other times, the model describes Taiwan as “an inalienable part of China’s territory,” adding: “We firmly oppose any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities and are committed to achieving the complete reunification of the motherland through peaceful means.”

Hot on the heels of DeepSeek’s latest models, other players in China’s tech sector are already rolling out new contenders in the race for AI dominance.

Alibaba on Sunday introduced its newest Qwen2.5-1M model, an upgrade from Qwen2.5-72B.

Kimi AI, owned by Beijing-based company Moonshot AI, also announced the launch of its latest multimodal reasoning model Kimi k1.5 on Saturday, which it touts as comparable to OpenAI’s o1.