The DeepSeek logo is seen in this illustration taken Jan 27, 2025. [Photo/Agencies]
Technology has been my beat for more than a decade now — part of my job as a business journalist is to keep a close eye on the latest trends and developments in China's ever-changing high-tech sector.
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek recently caused a global sensation with the release of its latest open-source large language model at significantly lower cost than its foreign counterparts, sending shock waves through the tech industry.
I marveled at the powerful capacities of DeepSeek, a rival of US-based OpenAI's ChatGPT, in terms of logical reasoning and language processing while asking it to create an ancient Chinese poem to celebrate my son's fourth birthday.
The ancient poem written by DeepSeek has precise characters, level and oblique tones, antithesis and rhyming. I asked the AI-powered chatbot to continuously polish previous versions it had created and let the new editions realize the harmony of sound and rhyme. To my surprise, it could perfectly understand my requirements, think deeply and make changes during the process, and I was finally very satisfied with its creations.
I also tested Baidu's LLM Ernie Bot and ByteDance's Doubao, and found that DeepSeek's works were full of catchy phrases and the beauty of phonology, outperforming those of its competitors. I am astonished by the great technological achievements that DeepSeek has made in such a short time as the Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based company was founded only in 2023.
Recently, I had the privilege of interviewing many industry insiders in the AI domain. They told me that the emergence of DeepSeek underscores China's growing innovation capacities in cutting-edge technology, challenging the dominance of Silicon Valley in the global AI landscape.
Currently, leading Chinese cloud computing companies, including Alibaba Cloud, Baidu AI Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud, as well as China's three largest telecom operators, have all integrated DeepSeek's AI models into their platforms. The China-developed model has also attracted attention from US companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia.
The success of DeepSeek has proved that it had circumvented traditional limitations and created what could become a new path for collective technological advancement despite facing restrictions in terms of advanced semiconductor technologies.
Experts told me that Washington's technological blockade would not impede China's innovation progress, and instead prompt Chinese enterprises to seek more technological breakthroughs.
Zhou Mi, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing, said the AI industry's development has long relied on huge amounts of computing capacity and capital input, but DeepSeek has overthrown the existing paradigm and redefined the global AI industry amid tightened export restrictions on advanced AI chips by the United States.
It seems that DeepSeek's success provides a new opportunity for international AI cooperation and showcases China's innovative strength and open attitude in the AI domain, which is conducive to fostering the sharing of AI technologies around the world, as well as collaboration and innovation.
"Technological breakthroughs can thrive even under restricted conditions, and China has the ability to lead in global AI innovation," said Ouyang Rihui, assistant dean of the China Center for Internet Economy Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics.
