DeepSeek: America’s Sputnik Moment for AI?

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two words have caught the Internet by storm. DeepSeek. The Chinese reasoning model r1 is rivaling others at the frontier with an open-source MIT license, methods that some claim may be 45x more efficient, an alleged $5.6m cost, the release of reasoning traces, a follow-on image model, and the fact that all of this was released by a hedge fund China. Many are already referring to this as a Sputnik moment. If that’s true, how should we – whether founder, researcher, policy maker – not just react, but act? Joining us to tease out the signal from the noise are a16z General Partner Martin Casado and a16z board partner, Steven Sinofsky. Both Martin and Steven have been on the frontlines of prior computing cycles, from the switching wars to the fiber buildout, and have witnessed the trajectories of companies like Cisco to AOL to ATT – even Worldcom. So what really drove this DeepSeek frenzy and more importantly what should we take away? Today, we answer that question through the lens of Internet history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	R1 comes out and it looks pretty good.
0:03.0	That's not the best layer to monetize it.
0:06.0	In fact, there might not be any money in that layer.
0:09.0	I have yet to see the GPT wrapper.
0:11.0	The internet is such a great example because there's no way this doesn't play out like the internet.
0:15.0	It's actually a very big step when it comes to the proliferation of this model.
0:25.4	It's a good reminder that there are always pockets of people innovating.
0:29.3	WorldCom and AT&T did not predict the internet was going to come out of universities.
0:32.8	Two words have caught the internet by storm.
0:34.7	Deep, seek.
0:39.5	Specifically a Chinese reasoning model that seems to rival others at the frontier.
0:41.4	But that's not all.
0:45.1	Alongside there are one model that dropped in late January came,
0:47.3	a fully open-source MIT license, a paper outlining its methods that some claim may be 45 times more efficient than other methods,
0:56.4	an alleged $5.6 million cost,
1:02.0	the release of reasoning traces, a follow-on image model, and the fact that all of this was released by a hedge fund in China. Since then, there have been so many claims and claims
1:07.7	about those claims that many are already referring to this as a Sputnik moment.
1:13.1	But if you think about it, the reason that Sputnik, the first satellite launched into lower Earth orbit by Russia in 1957,
1:20.8	the reason that Sputnik still matters in 2025 is because America took all the actions that it did in 58, 59, 60, a moon landing speech in 62,
1:31.0	all the way up to 1969 when we reached the moon.
1:35.4	Those are the actions that made Sputnik, Sputnik.
1:38.9	A wake-up call was responded to.
	...

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