DeepSeek Challenges US AI Dominance with Innovation (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is...

Speaker 2: The AI boom has been dominated by Silicon Valley's tech titans.

Speaker 1: With the launch of GPT-4, still the most capable model out in the world.

Speaker 2: But is this still the case? US hegemony on AI now appears to be over, now that China has released its own powerful model built at a fraction of the price, causing horror on the market.

Speaker 3: You're seeing markets being absolutely eviscerated on news from a company. Most people have never even heard of, it's not DeepFake, it's DeepSeek.

Speaker 1: Let's talk about DeepSeek because it is mind-blowing and it is shaking this entire industry to its core.

Speaker 2: The man behind DeepSeek met the Chinese premier last week. Liang Wenfen is a hedge fund boss who built DeepSeek as a side hustle. Whilst US tech billionaires committed trillions to AI, DeepSeek cost just $5 million. And this is how. These chips made by Nvidia power large language models like ChatGPT. One can cost up to $40,000 and a single model may use hundreds of thousands. These chips were so important that President Biden banned their export to China.

Speaker 4: The future of the chip industry is going to be made in America.

Speaker 2: Yet DeepSeek found a way to build their software using far cheaper chips.

Speaker 5: Without the Chips Act that prevented China from having the cutting edge chips, we probably wouldn't see DeepSeek today. We've got caught up in this notion that basically cash is king and that brute force matters. And so in a lot of the debates around AI, it's been the almost received wisdom that if you don't have big money, you can't be a player in the system. The fact that they've effectively been able to develop the final part of that model and train that model for $5 million does basically suggest that we should return back to this notion that actually constraints breed creativity.

Speaker 2: But that was not in the plan for President Trump last week.

Speaker 4: To announce the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history, and it's all taking place right here in America.

Speaker 2: The president's Stargate project pledged to raise half a trillion dollars in AI investment. But how viable is this now that DeepSeek has undercut American tech?

Speaker 6: You're never going to have enough data centers. You're never going to have enough ways to parse through the data. We're just making too much of it. So no, Stargate's not redundant. And is it going to be all $500 billion? Probably be more.

Speaker 2: In this space race, this was the moment Russia broke America's sense of superiority. Now DeepSeek has been called AI's Sputnik moment, if China's software makes AI models as cheap as their chips.