In 2017, China watched in awe — and shock — as AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program backed by Google, defeated a Chinese prodigy at a complex board game, Go. The decisive loss to a foreign computer program, which had similarly trounced a South Korean player, was a sort of Sputnik moment for China. That year, … Read more
In technology, many entrepreneurs get only one defining act. Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, is already on his second. The engineer, described by colleagues as introspective, first made his mark in China’s investment world in the late 2010s, cofounding a hedge fund that used artificial-intelligence models to deliver strong returns and attracted billions of … Read more
As the world scrambles to understand DeepSeek — its sophistication, its implications for the global A.I. arms race — one natural question has arisen: Given that it is made by a Chinese company, how is it dealing with Chinese censorship? I decided to test it out. I’m based in China, and I registered for DeepSeek’s … Read more
Inside China, it was called the tipping point for the global technological rivalry with the United States and the “darkest hour” in Silicon Valley, evoking Winston Churchill. It was possibly a breakthrough that could change the country’s destiny. The news that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek can build artificial intelligence models that are as good as … Read more
Two years ago, when big-name Chinese technology companies like Baidu and Alibaba were chasing Silicon Valley’s advances in artificial intelligence with splashy announcements and new chatbots, DeepSeek took a different approach. It zeroed in on research. The strategy paid off. The Chinese start-up has jolted the tech world with its claim that it created a … Read more