China is right to celebrate DeepSeek success but AI race isn't over, academic warns
Advertisement
While the rise of DeepSeek has 'naturally spawned a wave of strong nationalist sentiment', Beijing should be sober that it still lags far behind the US in tech and data quality, warned Zheng Yongnian, dean of the school of public policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Shenzhen campus (CUHK-Shenzhen).
'Excessive nationalism would be detrimental for China in the fiercer tech competition down the road,' Zheng posted on a social media account maintained by CUHK-Shenzhen on Friday.
05:00
Does the arrival of China's low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia's chip dominance?
Does the arrival of China's low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia's chip dominance?
DeepSeek, which is based in the eastern city of Hangzhou,
stunned the world by releasing two groundbreaking AI models – the V3 large-scale language model in December and the R1 inference model – last month. These open-source models perform on par with leading chatbots developed by US tech giants, such as OpenAI and Google, but are cheaper to train.
Chinese state media has been quick to champion the private company as a national asset in the country's competition for AI supremacy.
People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, called it 'a testament to China's swift tech adoption, vision and unyielding drive for innovation' amid
chip export sanctions by the US and its allies.
Advertisement
Zheng said that while the success of DeepSeek deserved the tributes, a populist mentality was not conducive to China's AI development. He noted that there remained a big gap between
Beijing and Washington in chip technology and data quality, 'which is equally important – we need to be clear what DeepSeek has not changed'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
4 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
WeChat and Uber team up to offer seamless overseas ride-hailing for Chinese travellers
Chinese social media giant Tencent Holdings has joined US-based ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies to provide a seamless way for Chinese globetrotters to hail rides overseas. In a statement on Monday, Shenzhen-based Tencent said it integrated Uber into its messaging-to-payment super app WeChat, so that users can book trips in nine more countries and regions, including the US, UK, France and Australia. Mainland Chinese users of WeChat can already hail Uber rides in Hong Kong and Japan by tapping the Uber mini-programme inside the all-purpose app. Tencent highlighted the convenience of not having to download a stand-alone Uber app to hail rides overseas. Instead, WeChat users can rely on the familiar Mandarin user interface and pay with WeChat Pay or WeChat Pay HK, the Hong Kong version of the mobile payment service, instead of using cash or credit cards. The tie-up would help to enrich WeChat's functions, serve Chinese travellers when they are abroad, and also give Uber access to WeChat's vast user base. This photo taken on July 10, 2022 shows the Tencent headquarters in Shenzhen, in China's southern Guangdong province. Photo: AFP With over 1.3 billion monthly active users, the 13-year-old WeChat – known as Weixin in mainland China – has become an integral part of digital daily life in the world's second-largest economy.
HKFP
5 hours ago
- HKFP
China confirms US bank employee banned from leaving over ‘criminal case'
Beijing confirmed Monday that an employee of US bank Wells Fargo was barred from leaving China, following reports last week that Shanghai-born managing director Chenyue Mao was under an exit ban. After multiple media reports, Wells Fargo confirmed last week that it was providing assistance to the Atlanta-based Mao, who entered China in recent weeks but is now unable to leave. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday that Mao was 'involved in a criminal case currently being investigated by the Chinese authorities'. 'The Chinese law enforcement agencies have imposed exit restrictions in accordance with the law,' Guo said. He did not give details of Mao's alleged offences, and Wells Fargo has not provided more information on her case. But the San Francisco-based bank is now restricting its employees from visiting China following this case, according to reports. It said in a statement to AFP on Friday that it was 'closely tracking this situation and working through the appropriate channels so our employee can return to the United States as soon as possible'. Guo said Mao 'cannot leave the country while the case is ongoing, and has an obligation to cooperate with the work of investigators'. He stressed that it was an 'individual case' and that China would 'continue as ever to welcome people from every country to travel and do business here'. 'No matter whether you are Chinese or not, you must follow Chinese laws while in China,' he said. Tensions and detentions Industry groups say multinational firms have faced an increasingly difficult business environment in recent years, citing a lack of transparency on data laws and prolonged detentions of employees in the country. The trend has coincided with growing tensions between Beijing and certain Western nations, particularly the United States but also regional competitors. The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing four unnamed sources, that an employee at the US Commerce Department was being prevented from leaving China after failing to declare on his visa application that he worked for the American government. The unnamed Chinese American man, who works for the Patent and Trademark Office, had travelled to China several months ago to visit family, the newspaper reported. Asked about the report on Monday, Guo said he was not familiar with the case. On Wednesday, a Chinese court sentenced a Japanese businessman from pharmaceutical company Astellas to three and a half years in prison for spying. Another pharma giant, UK-headquartered AstraZeneca, said in November that the head of its China operations, Leon Wang, had been detained, after reports that the firm was under investigation for potentially illegal data collection and drug imports. And in 2023, a senior executive at US risk advisory firm Kroll was prohibited from leaving China, according to the Wall Street Journal.
South China Morning Post
5 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Return of Nvidia H20 chip to China clears major AI upgrade bottleneck, Morgan Stanley says
The sales resumption of Nvidia's H20 chips in mainland China will clear a hardware bottleneck and boost the country's ambitions in artificial intelligence despite lingering supply uncertainties about the highly sought-after processor, according to Morgan Stanley. The lifting of US export restrictions on the H20 'removes a key near-term headwind' for China's AI development, and AI spending by China's major cloud service providers was set to increase by around 60 per cent to 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) this year, the US investment bank said in a report on Sunday. The outlook was positive for China's access to computing power and the US chipmaker's growth, despite questions about the supply of H20 chips, analysts said. Nvidia told its Chinese customers that the supply of the chips would be limited and that it did not plan to restart production of the model, according to a report on Saturday by technology media outlet The Information. However, Jensen Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and CEO, told Chinese media last week in Beijing that it currently took Nvidia about nine months from the placement of wafer orders to the delivery of finished chips, and that the company was 'working at full speed to restore the production capacity'. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. Nvidia announced last week that it received US government approval to resume sales of the H20, a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) specifically designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export control measures. Released in early 2024, the H20 was the top chip used by Chinese tech firms for AI training before Washington blocked its sale in April.
