JIM GERAGHTY: America’s Artificial Intelligence ‘Sputnik Moment?’

I find myself wondering about some of the boasts behind DeepSeek’s announcement.

• How certain are we that it really only cost $5.6 million to develop? Who’s in a position to verify that number? How do we know this really only took two months to get “trained”?
• In a world where nefarious actors can smuggle whole tankers full of oil in defiance of trade sanctions, it’s not that hard to smuggle small flat computer equipment. How do we know that DeepSeek is running on a bunch of lower-rated Nvidia H-800 chips and not some of these advanced H-100s?
• How certain are we that DeepSeek didn’t get some help from the Chinese government along the way? As with most Chinese companies, where does the company stop and the regime start?

Now, I don’t know about you, but when something allegedly amazing comes along for free from a mysterious Chinese company, the last thing I would want to do is download it onto my phone. Alas, not everyone else sees it that way; this week, DeepSeek is the most downloaded phone application on the Apple app store.

And oh, by the way, if you thought TikTok was a security risk on your phone, DeepSeek “collects your IP [address], keystroke patterns, device information and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the Chinese government.”

Many of our fellow citizens have learned nothing from the experiences of recent years.

As Steve noted yesterday: Commies Gonna Commie.