DeepSeek and China: How to think about borrowing a book, returning it and putting it out? (A Q&A: Trump Ai-Chaina Stargate)
If I borrow a book, and return it, I might be able to think about it in a different way. I have some information. If you go to the library, take the book, never return the book, put the book out under your name – those are two different ways to potentially think about this. I think the main point of the North Star is that there is a real competition between the U.S and China. And the consequences and stakes of that competition are enormous.
I was wondering if the difference between DeepSeek possibly accessing your data and you training your own products on other people’s work was the same.
DeepSeek: Collaboration with the National Labs in the U.S. and the Status of Artificial Intelligence in the Residual World
There is an infrastructure called the Stargate. The U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are competing to see who can lead in the field of artificial intelligence. Right now, the U.S. has a lead. It’s not a huge lead, but we do have a lead. The stakes are very high: Are we going to build the world on free, democratic and open Artificial Intelligence, or will it be authoritarian, autocratic? And what will decide that is something called compute. And compute is, if you add up the following pieces: chips, data, talent and energy. And if you put that full stack together, that represents 21st century AI infrastructure. And so what we announced last week with President Trump, with our partners at Oracle and SoftBank, is a $500 billion investment in U.S. AI infrastructure to generate that compute, which will help ensure that the U.S. maintains its lead in AI.
And now OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and a big part of Stargate — has announced it’s partnering with the U.S. National Laboratories to supply the government with advanced models for things like cybersecurity, energy infrastructure and nuclear security.
Mary Louise Kelly: Start with this new partnership with the National Labs. In a few sentences, why is this a big deal? What is the time frame for it to produce fruit?
LeHane: It’s vital that the U.S. has enough infrastructure to be able to maintain its lead. $500 billion is not U.S. taxpayer money. This is private sector money because they know that there is going to be a demand for the artificial intelligence which requires more and more compute.
Kelly: Does it need to be this expensive? $500 billion, is a lot of money, but DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup has prompted a conversation about whether foreign competitors are doing things cheaper than American companies.
DeepSeek was downloaded more than any other app in the U.S. App Store this week. Your company is investigating if DeepSeek used OpenAI data in an inappropriate way. What is the situation with that?
LeHane: We’re in the process of reviewing what may or may not have occurred. The world of artificial intelligence is known as the “residual world.” And distillation is a complex idea. Does this mean that people can send a lot of things to your models, and then use that information to replicate something else?
DeepSeek: Artificial Intelligence in the Sputnik Moment of the September 11th Stock Market Decay and the Stargate Throat
The selloff in tech stocks wiped more than a $1 trillion off of their value. The stock market decline of 17 percent on Monday was the largest in history and it hit Nvidia particularly hard.
In DeepSeek and Stargate, we have a perfect encapsulation of the two competing visions for the future of AI. One is closed and expensive, and it requires placing an ever-increasing amount of money and faith into the hands of OpenAI and its partners. The other is open source, but with questions around the privacy practices of data, and whether it is truly low-cost.
To put it lightly, the aftermath has been a bloodbath. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sounded the alarm, calling DeepSeek “AI’s Sputnik moment” — and that does appear to be how the AI industry and global financial markets are treating it.
The news cycle is moving very fast and there is a lot going on here. I invite the senior artificial intelligence reporter at the magazine to the show to talk about what has happened in the last couple of weeks and to figure out where the industry is headed in the future.