In the two months since a little-known Chinese company called DeepSeek released a powerful new open-source AI model, the breakthrough has already begun to transform the global AI market. DeepSeek-V3, as the company’s open large language model (LLM) is called, boasts performance that rivals that of models from top U.S. labs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama—but at a tiny fraction of the cost. This has given developers and users around the world access to leading-edge AI at minimal expense. In January, the company released a second model, DeepSeek-R1, that shows capabilities similar to OpenAI’s advanced o1 model at a mere five percent of the price. As a result, DeepSeek poses a threat to U.S. leadership in AI, paving the way for China to gain a dominant global position despite Washington’s efforts to limit Beijing’s access to advanced AI technologies. DeepSeek’s rapid rise shows how much is at stake in the global AI race. In addition to reaping the extraordinary economic potential of AI, the country that shapes the LLMs that underpin tomorrow’s apps and services will have outsize influence not only over the norms and values embedded in them but also over the semiconductor ecosystem that forms the foundation of AI computing. The fact that both China and the United States clearly believe that these technologies could provide military advantages only heightens the importance of achieving and maintaining long-term AI leadership.

Full opinion : The United States and the world in general needs to be aware of the real threat of rise of Chinese AI.