This week, China shocked the West with its announcement of DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence network capable of competing with OpenAI, Meta and Google. The fact that China was able to develop DeepSeek without a heavy supply of sophisticated microchips from Nvidia sent Nvidia stock spiraling, along with the other major tech companies in the United States: China seems to have cracked the code to bringing down the cost of AI development radically, in the process ending-around sanctions against their access to those microchips. In the words of former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, “Engineering is about constraints. The Chinese engineers had limited resources, and they had to find creative solutions.”
Now, it remains to be seen just how revolutionary DeepSeek’s development was. China has a bad habit of both stealing intellectual property and lying about its own technological development. Suffice it to say, however, that China has demonstrated once again that America exists in a competitive world — a world of enemies determined to outcompete the United States.
Some, like investor Marc Andreessen, have likened China’s announcement to the Soviet announcement of the launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957, a development that shocked the American people out of their post-war arrogance and led to the creation of the American space program.
It’s time for the U.S. to take the initiative again.
And that means it is time for America to unshackle its innovators.
This is something President Donald Trump understands well. He called DeepSeek a “wake-up” call for American industry, explaining “we need to be laser-focused on competing.” He added, “If you could do it cheaper, if you could do it (for) less (and) get to the same end result. I think that’s a good thing for us.”
He is not wrong. Lowering the barrier to entry for AI means wider innovation, which means faster development overall. But such development could be at odds with Trump’s self-stated goal of reshoring actual manufacturing to the United States: The same day he noted DeepSeek’s game-changing revelation, he announced that the United States would “be placing tariffs on foreign production of computer chips, semiconductors … to return production of these essential goods to the United States of America.” The goal would be the forced relocation of factories from countries like Taiwan back inside America’s borders.
The problem with this, of course, is that such relocation is both expensive and burdensome, adding time and cash to the list of hurdles American companies must clear to compete with DeepSeek and China. It would be wonderful if more semiconductors were produced in America. It is also years off. Giving up any competitive advantage — and Taiwan’s opposition to China means that it is oriented toward the U.S., thus granting us a competitive advantage — is a mistake.
One of the great advantages of the United States during the Cold War era was the Soviets’ addiction to economic autarky. The United States’ economic growth during the post-World War II era was attributable both to its relatively undamaged status during WWII and to its far more robust network of trade and security alliances, ranging from West Germany to Britain to Canada to Japan. If the United States wishes to outcompete China in AI — and everything else — it would be counterproductive to threaten the very relationships that grant us inherent advantage.
No doubt Trump knows that. TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer that leads the world in production of sophisticated microchips, has already vowed tens of billions of dollars in investment in the United States. Trump is utilitarian in his approach; he has no interest in losing the AI race to China over tariffs or anything else, and may well be using the threat of tariffs to pry concessions from companies like TSMC.
Whatever the case, America cannot afford to lose the AI race. China has fired the first shot in the AI battle. Now it’s time for America to do what we do best: win the war.
Ben Shapiro’s new collection, “Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious,” is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website.
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It’s amazing how many people just blindly accept whatever the pronouncements from the CCP are as unvarnished truth. The above article is sadly doing little more than parroting the official press releases coming from the Chinese communist state media.
Already in the last 48 hours, numerous questions and inconsistencies have arisen concerning Deep-Seek and how it was actually built and what it can actually do. Have we learned nothing from the Chinese communist party constantly putting out intentional disinformation for the last 30 years? A number of assumptions stated as fact in this article have already been found to be incorrect in the last 24 hours alone.
Yes, Deep-Seek looks impressive at first glance and we need to devote talent and resources to stay competitive in this AI space, but even the Chinese designer of this software has admitted it was built using Nvidia chips (that the Chinese have been smuggling into the country for the last two to three years) and relied on Large Language Models (LLM) from Open AI and other American AI developers. Deep-Seek also leveraged LLM from Chinese government AI projects, so there are a number of limitations and known flaws as a result.
This AI software has been around for about a year now, but the American MSM only recently picked up the story last week. So now of course it is being hyped for all its worth. At the end of the day, AI is still in its infancy and there will be a lot of players, both private sector and governmental, in the years to come. So of course, the United States has to continue to be part of this fourth industrial revolution or we will be fall behind competitively.
P.S.
For those not aware, Russia, China, Japan, several European countries and about two dozen mega corporations are all already developing their own AI capabilities. Did anyone here seriously think the United States would be the lone AI developer?