CHINA UPSTART STARTUP DEEPSEEK

Nvidia may appear to be the initial loser with $60 billion of stock value vaporized in an instant, but what about the high castle of Open AI which just had its vaunted moat crossed and walls breached?

There’s been a great deal of furor about the Internet-shaking, stock market-roiling introduction of DeepSeek’s ​R1 open-source language model, so maybe it’s a good time to take a deep breath and look at some of the issues from the ground up. No, the sky isn’t falling, and despite the desire of techno-nationalists to look at every advance of the other side as blow in an ongoing battle, it’s overall a good thing for the digital world that a start-up like DeepSeek is doing its thing, making smart technology available in a transparent way at a cost significantly lower than that of mega competitors.

Although Nvidia appears to have been the biggest loser, with 60 billion dollars of stock value vaporizing instantly, it will rebound because the world needs good chips, and Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is about as good as it gets. Even if DeepSeek’s innovative and efficient design means fewer chips are needed to power a search engine, it frees up chips, meaning more chips can be applied at graphics and…