While the world was focused on the actions of the Trump administration in its first week, a little-known Chinese startup startled the tech world last week with the release of an open source artificial intelligence tool that for a fraction of cost and resources of American competitors such as ChatGPT matches and in some cases outperforms its American rivals.
The company, DeepSeek, has gone even further, making its eponymous tool available for download for free. Only those seeking to use the company’s application programming interface―something which allows the tool to interface more easily with existing programs—must pay a fee that is only about 3 percent of that of other tools.
DeepSeek sheds light on two important issues. First, U.S. export controls on advanced computer technology, both hardware and software, are meaningless against a rival that has a highly educated population with the training and tools to work around such controls. The lack of resources essentially forced the DeepSeek team to solve problems related to efficiency that they would not have bothered to tackle if U.S. technology had been available. The team ended up producing a superior, much more cost-effective product as a result. In my December 2024 piece “U.S. China trade war: Is the latest battle really tit for tat?” I wrote:
China has all the intellectual infrastructure to produce top engineers and scientists, a vast computer chip manufacturing sector, and large deposits of and refining capacity for critical high-tech related metals. Not having access to U.S. chip-making equipment, software and advanced chips will just be a bump in the road for China.
In the wake of the DeepSeek achievement, that assessment turned out to be a gross overstatement. There wasn’t even a bump in the road. Instead, China easily shot ahead in AI technology development.
The other issue is one that has preoccupied me for years: How technology is giving growing power to individuals to do mass mischief. The DeepSeek breakthrough in AI is just the latest chapter. As long as AI required huge computing resources and vast amounts of money, the mischief would be more contained. But now, it seems, those barriers have fallen.
We can now add “personal” AI to my list of individual “empowerment” that already includes do-it-yourself genetic engineering; do-it-yourself drones (good for anonymous surveillance, property destruction and murder); do-it-yourself designer viruses (to which we humans have no immunity) using a combination of AI and synthetic biology; and 3D printing for guns and ammunition. I’m sure I’ve missed some that readers may have knowledge of.
The trouble with these technologies is that preventing a tiny minority of individuals from creating mass mayhem would require extremely intrusive and comprehensive surveillance and control measures. So, it’s either a brutally enforced ban on such technologies (never happen and may not be possible) or the extreme surveillance and control I just mentioned if we want to live in anything resembling peaceful civil society. Otherwise, a tiny number of individuals or groups will regularly be able to inflict mayhem on the rest of us. Will we decide that this is just the price we have to pay for new technologies that “empower” the individual?
