Flags of China and U.S. are displayed on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
U.S. export controls on high-tech chips may have inadvertently fuelled the success of start-up DeepSeek’s AI chatbot, sparking fears in Washington there could be little it can do to stop China in the push for global dominance in artificial intelligence.
The firm, based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, has stunned investors and industry insiders with its R1 programme, which can match its American competitors seemingly at a fraction of the cost.
That’s despite a strict U.S. regime prohibiting Chinese firms from accessing the kinds of advanced chips needed to power the massive learning models used to develop AI.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has admitted the “embargo on high-end chips” has proved a major hurdle in its work.
But while the curbs have long aimed at ensuring U.S. tech dominance, analysts suggest they may have spurred the firm to develop clever ways to overcome them.
The company has said it used the less-advanced H800 chips — permitted for export to China until late 2023 — to power its large learning model.
“The constraints on China’s access to chips forced the DeepSeek team to train more efficient models that could still be competitive without huge compute training costs,” George Washington University’s Jeffrey Ding said.
The success of DeepSeek, he said, showed “U.S. export controls are ineffective at preventing other countries from developing frontier models”.
“History tells us it is impossible to bottle up a general-purpose technology like artificial intelligence.”
DeepSeek is far from the first Chinese firm forced to innovate in this way: tech giant Huawei has roared back into profit in recent years after reorienting its business to address U.S. sanctions.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen described DeepSeek as a “Sputnik moment” — a reference to the Soviet satellite launch that exposed the yawning technology gap between the United States and its primary geopolitical adversary.
For years many had assumed U.S. supremacy in AI was a given, with the field dominated by big Silicon Valley names like OpenAI and Facebook-parent Meta.
While China has invested millions and vowed to be the world leader in AI technology by 2030, its offerings were hardly enough to raise hackles across the Pacific.
Tech giant Baidu’s attempt at matching ChatGPT, Ernie Bot, failed to impress on release — seemingly confirming views among many that Beijing’s stifling regulatory environment for big tech would prevent any real innovation. That was combined with a tough regime, spearheaded by the administration of Joe Biden, aimed at limiting Chinese purchases of the high-tech chips needed to power AI large language models.
But DeepSeek has blown many of those ideas out of the water.
“It’s overturned the long-held assumptions that many had about the computation power, the data processing that’s required to innovate,” Samm Sacks, a Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, told AFP.
Former U.S. Representative Mark Kennedy said that DeepSeek’s success “does not undermine the effectiveness of export controls moving forward”.
Washington could choose to fire the next salvo by “expanding restrictions on AI chips” and increased oversight of precisely what technology Chinese firms can access, he added.
Published – January 30, 2025 10:48 am IST
