If you believe the hype, something called DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, just leapfrogged the world.
It can do AI cheaper and better than established players like America’s Nvidia, which is why about $500 billion in market cap came out of the reigning AI king by noon on Monday.
It’s also why the tech heavy Nasdaq imploded more than 3% even before lunchtime.
I’m skeptical about the DeepSeek threat. I’m not saying it’s a deep fake, but I just don’t trust anything that comes out of China.
But DeepSeek is a warning, a stark one, for corporate America and policy makers in the Trump Administration.
The AI model it has developed may or may not be as good as the homegrown variety just yet, but what is undeniable is China’s intention to play hardball in the war for tech and economic dominance.
Unless American business and policy makers are ready to unleash the full force of American exceptionalism, we will lose.
Here’s some good news: Policy makers in the new Trump White House clearly understand this threat on multiple fronts.
The Trump Administration has set up an AI task force, led by techie David Sacks, to streamline regulatory burdens put in place by the Biden Administration — which was freaking out thinking AI would replace humans in every conceivable area of employment.
When an algorithm can come up with information five-hundreds times faster than the typical human there will be some displacement. But — and this is a big but — humans will be needed to create AI, to manufacture the chips that are used to make AI work, and they will be needed in all those industries that will grow and prosper as AI leads to productivity gains never seen before.
The Trump people get something else: We are rapidly losing our edge in technology and beyond because the thing that has made this country great — a fully functioning meritocracy — has been severely weakened by “woke” politics, including an insidious practice in hiring and promotion known as Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
No one is against diversity of course. But DEI as it is practiced in corporate America, literally subjugates merit for it. It’s a crude form of reparations, consequences be damned.
Joe Biden’s entire four years as president was built on DEI right up to whom he appointed as his vice president (his words). It filtered to federal contracting, which imposed those standards writ large on corporations that hiring and promotion must be done on intersectional terms that far outweighed merit.
A whole DEI industry was created to enforce these absurd and illegal measurements.
And what did we get? As a country, cultural division. As an economy, a weakened meritocracy that is eating away at our economic dominance in the face of the China threat.
That’s why Trump has wasted no time ending DEI in the federal government and alerting corporate America it must do so as well.
Team Trump, I am told, understands it’s one thing to lose our shirts in the making of shirts against China.
But if we lose the tech war — and by extension the battle over AI as it creates advances in medicine, as it powers how we consume news and knowledge and prepares our military when necessary — we are toast as a superpower.
DeepSeek is a warning that unless we unleash American exceptionalism, China will Deep Six the US economy.
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