Is Deepseek the Next Big Step in AI?

New Chinese AI

No, not really, but it does show that there is a global effort in the AI arms race, and China is right on course—or maybe even a little ahead of the U.S. American companies such as OpenAI, X, Google, and Meta are all racing to be the AI leader, but high-flyer Chinese hedge fund behind Deepseek currently has the edge.

The release of Deepseek to the public was huge. President Trump called it “a wake-up call.” He just announced an initiative, sponsored by many American players, to spend $500 billion on AI development. Did Trump already know about Deepseek, or was this just the suspicion these partners had, which led to this announcement right before Deepseek was revealed?

Currently, Deepseek is functioning and producing results much better than even ChatGPT, the leader in American AI created by OpenAI. Deepseek has been doing much better with coding problems; it appears that Deepseek is able to solve more complex issues and give more production-level code results. It’s also trained on many more coding languages than ChatGPT. It performed very similarly to ChatGPT in writing prompts, such as blog posts, an area where ChatGPT has long been the leader. Deepseek also has a unique ability to distinguish between human writing and AI, which could really help with content moderation.

Deepseek is trained on two different languages—both Chinese and English. This gives it more cultural knowledge and also a vastly larger data pool. This makes Deepseek the first-ever multilingual language model. The most important part, and the part I admire the most, is that Deepseek is now 100% open-source, meaning anyone and any dev can get their hands on the language model and build on it. This is a huge step for the AI community, and this likely means this is not Highflyer's biggest breakthrough— they’re saving that for later.

I believe the next big thing in AI is generative AI. AI can become significantly better at content creation, such as art and video. There is also a completely untapped market in generative music. Right now, AI can recreate artists with new songs, but I’d like to see it create completely new sounds and voices. I’d also like to see more of a joint effort between AR and AI to create something like Jarvis—that’s what we all really want. I don’t think Deepseek advances us toward either of those goals, so in that sense, it isn’t the game-changer it showed itself to be in the American market.