Is China surpassing the US in AI? Meta's chief AI scientist reacts to China's DeepSeek breakthrough
A Chinese startup called DeepSeek unveiled a new AI system that could match the capabilities of cutting-edge chatbots.
There’s a new AI star in town: DeepSeek. The hottest release in generative AI reportedly exhibits incredible reasoning capabilities at a fraction of the cost of models like GPT. Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has reacted to this advancement by comparing the artificial intelligence scene in the United States of America and China.
“To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think: ‘China is surpassing the US in AI.’ You are reading this wrong. The correct reading is: ‘Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones’,” LeCun wrote.
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“DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source (e.g. PyTorch and Llama from Meta). They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people's work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it. That is the power of open research and open source,” the AI scientist added.
What is the hype around DeepSeek?
According to the Financial Times, DeepSeek has “drastically reduced inference costs.” This breakthrough challenges the assumption that cutting-edge AI requires many billions of dollars in addition to vast amounts of computational power.
Social media weights in:
Various comments flooded the Meta scientist’s post, with some wondering if China would emerge as the winner in this AI war. An individual wrote, “China is surpassing the US in robotics.” Another added, “Welcome not back. Great Point that everything is built on open source. So Open Source is winning, not China.” A third commented, “I hope you are right.” A fourth expressed, “If open-source AI continues to thrive, how will this affect the job market in technology? Will it lower the barrier to entry for new developers, potentially leading to job displacement in some sectors but creation in others?”
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{{/usCountry}}Various comments flooded the Meta scientist’s post, with some wondering if China would emerge as the winner in this AI war. An individual wrote, “China is surpassing the US in robotics.” Another added, “Welcome not back. Great Point that everything is built on open source. So Open Source is winning, not China.” A third commented, “I hope you are right.” A fourth expressed, “If open-source AI continues to thrive, how will this affect the job market in technology? Will it lower the barrier to entry for new developers, potentially leading to job displacement in some sectors but creation in others?”
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{{/usCountry}}About Deepseek
Its official website says it “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally.”
