DeepSeek’s AI leap is a milestone innovation breakthrough for China but it does not change the overall leading position of the United States in the field of artificial intelligence, a prominent adviser to Beijing said.
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.
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.
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”.
He said China was still incapable of producing advanced semiconductors, which were critical for the competitiveness of various sectors, from manufacturing to national defence.
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