Is China winning the AI race?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The stock market plummeted this week after a Chinese company showed it could do more with less. Today, we talk about the new AI chatbot DeepSeek, and why people are freaking out about it – from Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Washington.
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For two years, American artificial intelligence companies looked unstoppable. Then came DeepSeek.
Today on Post Reports, we talk to tech policy reporter Eva Dou about how a scrappy startup became so dominant, and what it means for the AI arms race.
Eva has a book out now about one of the world’s most controversial tech companies, set against the backdrop of the political, social and economic transformation of China. It’s called “House of Huawei: The Secret of China’s Most Powerful Company.”
Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Maggie Penman and mixed by Sam Bair. Thanks to James Graff.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For two years, it seemed like American artificial intelligence was unstoppable. |
| 0:07.5 | Microsoft announced this week that artificial intelligence will soon allow conversations with its software and search engine Bing. |
| 0:13.8 | Google raced to announce similar plans. |
| 0:15.7 | The tech giant is to boost its Siri voice assistant and operating systems with OpenAI's chat GPT as it seeks to |
| 0:24.9 | catch up in the AI race. |
| 0:27.7 | Leading developers like OpenAI attracted billions of dollars in investment by arguing that this technology |
| 0:35.7 | was the future. |
| 0:37.5 | And they needed a lot of money to develop it. |
| 0:40.8 | Then just over a week ago, a new app arrived on the scene, DeepSeek. |
| 0:48.0 | So this app called DeepSeek, it's an AI chatbot quite similar to chat GPT. |
| 0:56.9 | Eva Doe covers tech policy for The Post. |
| 1:01.1 | She says DeepSeek claimed that it spent less than $6 million developing an early version of the app. |
| 1:04.1 | Which is really a minuscule amount compared to some of these U.S. tech giants who have been fundraising for billions |
| 1:13.7 | and tens of billions and even hundreds of billions of dollars to create cutting-edge models. |
| 1:21.2 | The Chinese startup's AI assistant catapulted to the top of app stores last weekend. |
| 1:27.3 | And this has all spooked Washington, |
| 1:30.2 | Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. Tech stocks dropped Monday. And U.S. officials, engineers, |
| 1:37.2 | and investors have become even more alarmed by the competitive threat posed by China. |
| 1:43.8 | The AI race has been something that both U.S. officials and Chinese officials have been laser |
| 1:49.3 | focused on. And the common wisdom had been that China is quite a bit behind, maybe a year behind, |
| 1:55.6 | maybe more. And this new AI model shows they've really closed the gap. |
| 2:05.4 | They're much closer as a rival than people had realized. |
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