Will the US-China rivalry slip into a cold war with the arrival of the DeepSeek chatbot?

Has Beijing already scored a victory in Artificial Intelligence by releasing its open-source Large Language Module R1, which is much more efficient than OpenAI Chat GPT and Gemini?

Is it a new Sputnik moment of October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union shocked the world and proved its supremacy over the US by successfully launching its first artificial satellite?

DeepSeek Shocks Everyone

As a cold war began the with launch of Sputnik and gave the communist regime of Moscow an upper hand, though temporarily, will DeepSeek give an edge to China and begin one more cold war between the two super powers?

The Hangzhou-based AI company not only developed its AI chat bot within three months but also at a fraction of what tech super giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google have spent.

What a hitherto unknown and low-profile Chinese company achieved by spending $6 million, is a matter of envy for OpenAI and others.

DeepSeek has claimed that its R1 model matches the capabilities of OpenAI’s o1 model. The Liang Wengfeng-owned company has integrated its R1 model into the AI chatbot.

How Did DeepSeek Disrupt AI World?

Disrupting the world of AI, soon after being launched on Apple’s US App Store, DeepSeek soon became number one surpassing ChatGPT. It also became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s China App Store.

How the Chinese AI chat bot has shaken the US establishment can be gauged by how US President Donald Trump has reacted to it. He admitted that the DeepSeek release “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win”.

Donald Trump: DeepSeek Release “Should Be A Wake-Up Call

Taking a cue from the Chinese company, the US President expressed hope that it could be a “positive” thing for the country’s tech giants and argued, “instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with hopefully the same solution”.

Analysts believe, Washington has been shaken deeply and sees it as the loss to China in the race to develop better, faster and cheaper AI chat bots.

Donald Trump’s AI advisor David Sacks justified the US President’s executive order reversing orders issued under Joe Biden. He said that DeepSeek’s success proved that the safety standard regulations for AI development “would have hamstrung American AI companies without any guarantee that China would follow suit.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Calls DeepSeek New Competitor

Reacting to DeepSeek, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media platform X, where he wrote in a post that it was “legit invigorating to have a new competitor”. He called R1 “an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price”.

The immediate impact of DeepSeek was that he pledged to speed up some OpenAI releases.

Echoing the sentiments, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the tech industry trade group Chamber of Progress said, “Now the top AI concern has to be ensuring the United States wins.”

Bloodbath At Wall Street: Nvidia Loses Billions

Not only the political and tech establishment but also the business set up of the US has been shaken and taken aback by DeepSeek’s ability to achieve competitive results with less advanced and significantly cheaper hardware.

Chip manufacturing giant Nvidia’s share prices plummeted 17% and it market cap was lowered by hundreds of billions that triggering a blood bath on Wall Street.

Reacting to DeepSeek’s achievement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to social media platform and wrote in a post that “as AI becomes more efficient and accessible, its adoption will soar, transforming it into an indispensable commodity.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Promises Open Source AI Model

Praising DeepSeek, Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, called its LLM R1, “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” and “a profound gift to the world.”

Upset by the success of the Chinese AI firm, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed hope in a Facebook post that a new version of Facebook’s open-source AI model family Llama would become “the leading state of the art model” upon release.

However more Chinese companies are working for the development of AI and Machine Learning.

Unstoppable, Chinese Surge

Artificial Intelligence and robotics firm UBTech Robotics has planned to produce humanoid robots on a massive scale. The Zhou Jian-owned company aims to produce humanoid robots in such a large number that it can reach every household.

UBTech has said that these robots are not ready for daily use, so these will be trained at factories now. However, soon they would be good enough to do the daily chores of every household.

Analysts believe the success of the Chinese firm will have far-reaching consequences that would transcend the border of technology, business or politics.

US-China Cold War Unfolds

It may change the world’s political dynamics and bring concrete and hitherto unknown changes in the geostrategic ground realities because the US is most likely to try upping the ante.

As the launch of Sputnik began a US-USSR race in almost all spheres, including defense, the release of R1 LLM developed by DeepSeek would force Washington to work more vigorously in an attempt to steal the show from China.

Political observers believe the success of DeepSeek may offer President Xi Jinping to claim that it is in sync with his China Dream.

The communist regime may also claim that China may dominate the world in all spheres by 2048, when it will celebrate the hundred years of Mao Zedong-led communist revolution.

The bastion of capitalism will try its best to stop the communist regime shine.

The US is most likely to pour billions of dollars into development of cutting-edgethe technology and innovation is evident by the fact that President Donald Trump has announced to set up a corpus of $500 billion for this purpose.

The US-China rivalry is most likely to escalate and touch new heights in all fields, as has been demonstrated by Chinese success in AI.