The emergence of a powerful Chinese AI model has prompted a panicked response from leading US firms and led to warnings of a global AI arms race.
Artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released the latest version of its open-source AI last week, which rivals the best models of tech giants like Meta and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
DeepSeek-R1 surpasses its rivals in several key metrics, while also costing just a fraction of the amount to train and develop.
Its capabilities helped propel it to the top of Apple’s App Store’s charts, overtaking ChatGPT as the top-rated free application in the US.
In a post to the employment forum Blind, an anonymous Meta employee claimed that the company’s generative artificial intelligence division was in “panic mode” over DeepSeek.
“Engineers are moving frantically to dissect DeepSeek and copy anything and everything we can from it. I’m not even exaggerating,” the employee wrote in the post.
“Management is worried about justifying the massive cost of gen ai org. How would they face the leadership when every single ‘leader’ of gen ai org is making more than what it cost to train DeepSeek v3 entirely, and we have dozens of such ‘leaders’.”
Silicon Valley experts warned that the dominance of US Big Tech is under threat from DeepSeek, which offers a cost-effective alternative to current AI development methods.
Nigel Green, chief executive of the financial advisory firm deVere Group told The Independent that DeepSeek was disrupting the global tech landscape and escalating the AI arms race.
“The launch of this innovation underscores a historic pivot in the balance of technological power,” he said.
“China’s technological advances, particularly in AI, are eroding the US’s ability to use tariffs as a tool to maintain global supremacy... This is not just about a single company; it represents a larger trend that will redefine the global economic landscape.This is the clearest signal yet of where the future is heading.”
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun acknowledged the rise of DeepSeek, but claimed that it should be seen as less of a threat and more a demonstration of the strength of open source models.
“Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones,” he wrote in a post to Threads.
“DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source... 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.”
