DeepSeek's success an opportunity for global AI cooperation
By Fan Feifei | China Daily
Technology has been my beat for more than a decade now - part of my job as a business journalist is
to keep a close eye on the latest trends and developments in China's ever-changing high-tech sector.
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek recently caused a global sensation with the
release of its latest open-source large language model at significantly lower cost than its foreign
counterparts, sending shock waves through the tech industry.
I marveled at the powerful capacities of DeepSeek, a rival of US-based OpenAI's ChatGPT, in terms
of logical reasoning and language processing while asking it to create an ancient Chinese poem to
celebrate my son's fourth birthday.
The ancient poem written by DeepSeek has precise characters, level and oblique tones, antithesis
and rhyming. I asked the AI-powered chatbot to continuously polish previous versions it had
created and let the new editions realize the harmony of sound and rhyme. To my surprise, it could
perfectly understand my requirements, think deeply and make changes during the process, and I was
finally very satisfied with its creations.
I also tested Baidu's LLM Ernie Bot and ByteDance's Doubao, and found that DeepSeek's works were
full of catchy phrases and the beauty of phonology, outperforming those of its competitors. I am
astonished by the great technological achievements that DeepSeek has made in such a short time
as the Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based company was founded only in 2023.
Recently, I had the privilege of interviewing many industry insiders in the AI domain. They told
me that the emergence of DeepSeek underscores China's growing innovation capacities in cutting-
edge technology, challenging the dominance of Silicon Valley in the global AI landscape.
Currently, leading Chinese cloud computing companies, including Alibaba Cloud, Baidu AI Cloud,
Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud, as well as China's three largest telecom operators, have all
integrated DeepSeek's AI models into their platforms. The China-developed model has also
attracted attention from US companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia.
The success of DeepSeek has proved that it had circumvented traditional limitations and created
what could become a new path for collective technological advancement despite facing restrictions
in terms of advanced semiconductor technologies.
Experts told me that Washington's technological blockade would not impede China's innovation
progress, and instead prompt Chinese enterprises to seek more technological breakthroughs.
Zhou Mi, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic
Cooperation in Beijing, said the AI industry's development has long relied on huge amounts of
computing capacity and capital input, but DeepSeek has overthrown the existing paradigm and
redefined the global AI industry amid tightened export restrictions on advanced AI chips by the
United States.
It seems that DeepSeek's success provides a new opportunity for international AI cooperation and
showcases China's innovative strength and open attitude in the AI domain, which is conducive to
fostering the sharing of AI technologies around the world, as well as collaboration and innovation.
"Technological breakthroughs can thrive even under restricted conditions, and China has the
ability to lead in global AI innovation," said Ouyang Rihui, assistant dean of the China Center
for Internet Economy Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics.