It was coming, and it came! Tech markets are in freefall. That the tech industry is built on a lie. Nothing is what it seems.
Tech industry markets have been reeling from setbacks after its killer assumptions were exposed to be misleading and outright deceit.
The tech industry based in the Silicon Valley in the US was based on sporadic costs, sanctions and counting upon cutting edge technologies were barriers to entry.
As a result, the monopoly of AI was driving the investment in the stock market. What DEEPSEEK has done was to pierce the tech balloon, and the tech markets were jolted and deflated.
This article recaps the unfolding events following the deep seek app introduction into the market.
Deepseek built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. titans like Google and OpenAI, showcasing the limits of chip export control.
The then outgoing Biden administration had issued new rules that aim to keep China from obtaining advanced A.I. chips through other countries.
The rules crafted on multiple rounds of earlier restrictions that prevented Chinese companies from being able to buy or make cutting-edge computer chips.
President Trump has not yet indicated whether he will keep the rules or rescind them.
The U.S. government has tried to keep advanced chips out of the hands of Chinese companies over concerns they could be used for military purposes.
In response, some firms in China have stockpiled thousands of chips, while others sourced them from a thriving underground blackmarket of smugglers.
The world’s leading A.I. companies train their chatbots using supercomputers that use as many as 16,000 chips, if not more. DeepSeek’s engineers, on the other hand, said they needed only about 2,000 specialized computer chips from Nvidia.
The constraints on chips in China forced the DeepSeek engineers to train it more efficiently so it could still be competitive.
It costed about $6 million to build DeepSeek app while the US behemoth such as Amazon and Microsoft have reportedly chipped in over $15 billions to competing generative AI startups.
The CEO of one of those startups may yet try to raise as much as $7 trillion more (that’s not a typo), to make the precious chips needed to train models for AI systems more abundant.
Recently, Amazon and Microsoft have reportedly committed at least a combined $15 billion to competing generative AI startups. The CEO of one of those startups may yet try to raise as much as $7 trillion more (that’s not a typo), to make the precious chips needed to train models for AI systems more abundant.
DeepSeek is run by a quantitative stock trading firm called High Flyer. By 2021, it had channeled its profits into acquiring thousands of Nvidia chips, which it used to train its earlier models.
The company hires people without any computer science background to help the technology understand and be able to generate poetry and ace questions on the notoriously difficult Chinese college entrance examination.
DeepSeek does not make any products for consumers, leaving its engineers to focus entirely on research.
That means that its technology is not hemmed in by the strictest aspect of China’s regulations on A.I., which require consumer-facing technology to comply with the government’s controls on information.
A crucial part of this rapidly changing global market is an old concept: open source software. Like many other companies, DeepSeek has open sourced its latest A.I. system, implying that it has shared the underlying code with other businesses and researchers.
This allows others to build and distribute their own products using the same technologies.
The open source ecosystem for A.I. gathered steam in 2023 when Meta freely shared an A.I. system called LLama.
Many assumed that this community would flourish only if the companies like Meta — tech giants with massive data centers filled with specialized chips — continued to open source their technologies.
But DeepSeek and others have shown that they, too, can expand the powers of open source technologies.
The US Congress is investigating the implications of open source technologies to see whether open source may be a catalyst of disinformation or inflict some serious unknown damage.
The Congress was planning to tame the open source but Trump rescinded the Biden era executive order that had curbed open source technologies.
Others argue that if regulators stifle the progress of open source technology in the United States, China will gain a significant edge.
If the best open source technologies come from China, they argue, U.S. developers will build their systems atop those technologies.
In the long-run, that could put China at the heart of A.I. research and development.
And, this is happening already. With as little as $500 in computing power, AI students have been building their search engines on top of Chinese open source technologies driving down costs of setting up their own AI engines.
Deepseek has upended tech markets because now investors know high cost tech franchises cannot monopolize the AI market to generate super profits for their shareholders.
That had caused a stampede of dumping tech shares at giveaway prices.
Open source has been a cornerstone of the development of computer software, the internet and, now, artificial intelligence.
The idea is that technology advances faster when its computer code is freely available for anyone to examine, use and improve upon.
The whole concept is based on working in one accord for a common end undaunted by the potential rivalries that may be generated as a result of it. In this case the ends justify the means.
China’s efforts could have enormous implications as A.I. technology continues to develop in the years to come.
The technology could increase the productivity of workers, fuel future innovations and power a new wave of military technologies, including autonomous weapons.
As I have been recommending in the past, Tanzania government needs to change her modus operandi fast.
Priorities in empowering our youths ought to focus in lowering or eliminating the barrier costs of Internet usage.
We are being left behind because the Internet costs and ownership of a laptop are out of the reach of many potential users.
We need to redirect ourselves from a regime that pampers her policymakers and legislators to investing in industries that will put food in our mouths. Instead of buying money guzzling SUVs and filthy handouts of emoluments, we may purchase Internet satellites and launch them that will avail cost effective Internet to our own people.
Consumerism practices are guardrails that explain why joblessness and under-employment gawk at us day and night.
With entry costs to the digital world decreased we may easily put one million unemployed to work in as few years as 5.
What is stopping us is lack of commitment and political will. Could lifting millions out of poverty an existential threat for CCM perpertual stay in power? Rephrasing this, does CCM need poverty and ignorance to prolong her unwelcome stay in power?.
If so, then we may not be able to pull ourselves from the jaws of poverty unless we kick CCM out of the power loop.
