How DeepSeek Can Help Britain
My new Spectator article on a major geopolitical event
Hello and welcome back to What China Wants.
You might have seen the furore about the release of DeepSeek-R1 yesterday, the Chinese competitor to US AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini (from Google).
I have written an article for The Spectator on what this means for Britain’s own AI ambitions, here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-deepseek-can-help-britain/
For those behind stuck at the paywall, I suggest that China’s breakthrough in creating a high performance AI tool that (officially) cost a fraction of what it took the US companies to do is something that should inspire the UK to accelerate the development of its own sovereign AI. The risk of not doing so, and being cut out of the leading players in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is stark.
Outside of the impact on the UK, I honestly think this is a game changing geopolitical event. For the last few years the US has sought to curtail China’s AI and wider tech capabilities through export controls and pressure on allies. This might have stopped the PRC developing blue sky tech that can out-imagine what America can compete, but with DeepSeek we see how necessity is the mother of invention.* The fact that Washington has failed to prevent China in this will have major consequences, not least in weakening US tech influence around the world. Given the importance of tech in commercial, political, and military terms, this is no small detail.
I’ll have more of a think on the geopolitical ramifications and will return to this shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the article.
Thanks for reading.
Sam
*This should come as no suroprise to those of you who have geekily looked up the stats on China’s patent numbers, which clearly show how they prefer to iterate rather than come up with something brand new, as this article shows.