A significant step has been taken to lower the technological “Iron Curtain” over the world, writes Anna Sytnik, General Director of ANO Kolaboratoria, in a column for the Wsgljad newspaper. In her opinion, the rules of the game on the AI market will soon change and the bubble of artificial intelligence will burst. Two competing, independent AI ecosystems will emerge in the world, similar to the Cold War, where the AI race could lead to the formation of competing regions, each governed by different standards for artificial intelligence. Different world regions will align with the competing technologies. For example, the BRICS+ countries may support Chinese technologies, while the collective West might favor US-based solutions. Anna Sytnik explains:
“The split of the AI world was significantly accelerated by the reaction in the US to DeepSeek-R1, developed by a small Chinese company with a smaller budget than one of the Meta teams. What the company did was ignore the established rules of the industry in the US. As a result, the news caused chaos, general irritation and admiration in the West. It turned out that the Chinese model, which can argue, has a comparable performance to the world leader, the US-based o1 model from OpenAI.”
Notably, the Chinese model was trained with fewer computational resources and lower costs than its competitors. “Earlier, people thought that training large language models was a luxury. OpenAI, Anthropic and other IT giants spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it” the expert says. The whole thing was shocking to the Western world.
Additionally, DeepSeek-R1 is an open-source system, allowing anyone to download the model and use it without an internet connection. This sets the system apart from its American competitors. Moreover, the Chinese application is extremely user-friendly. The Chinese have suddenly outpaced the Americans and done so in an offensively elegant way. The expert summarizes:
“The bubble of the AI industry has burst. Now, everyone will have to adjust to new conditions. The rules of the game will change. DeepSeek has challenged the enormous investments of American companies in AI. For a change, the Chinese scientists will not be catching up with Western researchers, but the other way around. Mark Zuckerberg has already set up an ’emergency team’ of engineers to figure out how a small Chinese company brought a groundbreaking AI technology to the market. They will adopt the know-how of DeepSeek to reduce the costs of training and operation.