DeepSeek Shows There’s No AI Monopoly

Brian Albrecht February 10, 2025

City Journal View Original Source

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“The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life,” observed the late British economist and Nobel laureate Sir John Hicks. But there’s no quiet life in artificial intelligence.

When Chinese startup DeepSeek recently demonstrated it could train world-class AI models using a fraction of the computing resources required by industry leaders, it revealed something crucial about competition in AI: dominance is more fragile than markets and regulators believed. Through clever engineering, DeepSeek claims to have achieved performance rivaling top firms OpenAI and Anthropic. And it did so while reportedly spending just $5 million on compute—a rounding error compared with the budgets of leading AI labs.

Read the full piece here.