Proliferating and prevailing technology is not a legacy and heritage of any country or a person, while accessible and affordable technology benefits the entire mankind as proven by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which has completely astonished the world.
The Economist reported that on January 27 stock markets in America and Europe convulsed. The share price of Nvidia, America's AI chip champion, fell by 17%, erasing $600 billion of market value, the biggest one-day loss in the history of America's stock market. Other businesses in the AI supply chain, from data-centre landlords to makers of networking gear, suffered a similar fate.
Dukan CEO and Rozee Chairman Monis Rahman, who is also Recruit AI Co-Founder, said the world, especially the West, was not expecting a Chinese AI model to be as good as the best American AI models so quickly, just one year after it was founded.
The US had blocked Nvidia from selling high-end AI chips to China, specifically to prevent what just happened. DeepSeek has spent about one-twentieth of the amount of money training its superb model compared to the US counterparts like OpenAI.
Additionally, the inference cost of using DeepSeek is about 1/27th of the cost of OpenAI's equivalent model. As DeepSeek is so efficient with its algorithms, less expensive Nvidia GPUs are required, and correspondingly much less power consumption is needed, which is currently the limiting factor for AI future.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, DeepSeek has open-sourced its licence under the permissive MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) License, which allows anyone to install and run DeepSeek on their own servers, in their own premises, with data privacy. This will put pressure on other AI companies to open-source their models.
One thing is clear – this development is going to lead to the commoditisation of AI foundational models, which have received billions of dollars in funding to develop.
Western investors and tech giants alike are re-evaluating the amount of money needed to produce and run AI models. DeepSeek has proven that using algorithmic ingenuity during inference can produce spectacular results at a fraction of the compute power.
Among other techniques, DeepSeek employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach, where they route queries to smaller, more efficient models depending on the nature of the question. By using several smaller and specially trained models instead of one combined large model, DeepSeek has demonstrated that we can gain tremendous efficiency at a fraction of the cost.
In a recent interview, DeepSeek's 40-year-old founder Liang Wenfeng stressed the importance of China transitioning from a follower to a leader in technological innovation. He stated that China's tech industry has often been seen as lagging behind the US, but the real gap lies in originality versus imitation. He has put China on the AI map, which comes with its own nuances, both at home and internationally.
The US considers staying ahead of China in the AI race to be a strategic imperative. It is a race to dominate the interpretation of the world's information. More measures like stricter chip embargos will be put in place to slow down China's progress.
Demand has skyrocketed globally and the world seems to have an insatiable appetite to integrate AI into everything. Every software company today is urgently trying to add AI to their offerings, both in fear of being left behind and in awe of what they are now able to do.
"That's why we reinvented Rozee by creating and launching RozeeGPT.ai recently – Pakistan's first home-grown AI recruiting platform that automates job descriptions, CV matching, AI video interviews, and more. AI models are becoming cheaper to train, cheaper to use, open source, and with much lower energy consumption. This will propel AI into thousands of more use cases that were previously not feasible. New investors will be able to invest in more ventures due to the decrease in cost, further spurring innovation," Monis Rahman said.
"The emergence of China as an AI superpower, with perhaps many other nations close behind, is good for humanity as brightest minds globally propel mankind forward.
"AI should not be a monopoly in the hands of one nation, especially if it's not your nation! Every country should understand the strategic importance of developing their own models – the alternative is intellectual colonialism," he said.
Once the US president ascends the throne, he longs to promote fossil fuel, abolishing EV (electric vehicle) mandate just because China is completely going to capture the EV market of the world. Western forces will have to come out of the conservative, disruptive and protectionist strategy-cum-mentality to embrace ground realities.
Regional expert and Centre for South Asia & International Studies Islamabad Executive Director Dr Mehmoodul Hassan Khan said US President Donald Trump was taking comprehensive punitive measures, blocking Chinese EVs on fears of complete capture of the domestic market because of qualitative, affordable, durable, environment-friendly, innovative, attractive and customer-friendly features.
Neither Trump's high tariff therapy, awkward legislative measures, ongoing decoupling, de-risking policies and geopolitical maneuverings nor the US automobile industry does not have any match against China because China's new energy vehicle (NEV) sales accounted for 70% of the world's total sales between January and November 2024, demonstrating a clear trend of acceleration and expansion and surpassing the global average growth rate. Thus, Chinese BYD is the clear winner as compared to Tesla in the EU and US markets.
Khan said DeepSeek had been dubbed as Sputnik space launch, which started a new space war between the US and former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). It has remarkable cost efficiency, pushing the boundaries of AI ethics and transparency and dismantling physical barriers.
Additionally, it has chosen to make its model free to access and modify under one of the most open-source licences, radically transforming the AI ecosystem by enabling a large number of players beyond China's borders to benefit from this technological breakthrough. It is interactive, integrative, innovative, productive, futuristic and generative, which make it a social media darling.
It has socio-economic, geopolitical and geostrategic implications and has been termed an answer to the US and West technological imperialism and secret of the Global South's future digitalisation and AI.
It seems that the US energy companies are going to be hit badly by DeepSeek. It showcased a chatbot using a lesser fraction of electricity, rivaling the best American AI programmes. Its launch hammered shares of US uranium producers and natural gas pipeline operators alike.
Moreover, LandBridge Co, which supports gas-fired power plants and new "digital infrastructure opportunities such as data centres" that would use electricity, also suffered a stock drop of 17%.
Even oil major Chevron Corp is feeling the heat of DeepSeek. The largest US nuclear plant operator, Constellation Energy Corp, lost a fifth of its market value on January 27. Thus, the US gas pipeline operators, energy companies and nuclear energy producers are expecting huge losses because of sustained, diversified, modernised, qualitative and innovative DeepSeek AI features useful for these sectors of the economy. Thus, it has started new AI economics.
The writer is a staff correspondent
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