The North Star: Competing Deepeek, DeepSeek and Partnering with the Government (Q&A:Trump Ai-chat gpt Deepeek and partnering with the government)
Lehane thinks that it is possible to return a book if you borrow it from the library. There are certain things I have. If you go to the library, take the book, never return the book, put the book out under your name – those are two different ways to potentially think about this. But I think that the big point – the North Star that I would just really emphasize – is that there is a real competition between the U.S. and China. The stakes of the competition are enormous.
Kelly wanted to know the difference between a rival company having access to your data and you training your own products without their permission.
Source: Q&A: OpenAI on rival DeepSeek and partnering with the government
Deep Seek: The Birth of the First AI Infrastructure in the United States? Chris LeHane: The story of the birth of open AI in the U.S.
LeHane: Stargate is infrastructure. At the end of the day, the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are in a race, a competition to see who ultimately leads in AI. Right now, the U.S. has a lead. We have a lead, but it’s not a huge one. The stakes could not be bigger: Are we going to build the world on democratic, free AI, or is it going to be authoritarian, autocratic AI? And what will decide that is something called compute. And compute is, if you add up the following pieces: chips, data, talent and energy. And if you put that full stack together, that represents 21st century AI infrastructure. And so what we announced last week with President Trump, with our partners at Oracle and SoftBank, is a $500 billion investment in U.S. AI infrastructure to generate that compute, which will help ensure that the U.S. maintains its lead in AI.
Chris LeHane: OpenAI has brought its leading edge innovation and artificial intelligence technology into the US National Labs. It will be critical as those labs move forward in research and development that will support national security imperatives. But at the end of the day, what it’s really bringing is our leading edge tech, the innovation that we’re building and making sure that we’re doing it in collaboration and in partnership with the U.S. government.
There is a partnership between the National Labs and Mary Louise Kelly. This is a big deal, so why did it take so long? How long will it take for it to bear fruit?
LeHane: It’s important that the U.S. has the infrastructure to maintain its lead. This is not taxpayer money, when you talk about the $500 billion. Private sector money is necessary because of the fact that there will be more and more demand for artificial intelligence, which will require more and more compute.
The company claims that the R1 cost less than six million dollars to train, even though it was reported that the training cost was as high as $100 million. On Monday, the stock market crashed because Deep Seek went viral and became the No. 1 app in the US.
We are talking about DeepSeek and how the open-sourced artificial intelligence model was built, in today’s episode of Decoder.
LeHane: We’re in the process of reviewing what may or may not have occurred. There is something that happens in the AI world called distillation. It is a complex idea. Can people send so much stuff to your models that they are able to take information out of it, and use that information to replicate something else?
Where the AI Industry is heading next: Verge Senior Research Editor Kylie Robison on DeepSeek & Stargate (Nvidia, Inc.)
Panicked investors wiped more than $1 trillion off of tech stocks in a frenzied selloff earlier this week. Nvidia, in particular, suffered a record stock market decline of nearly $600 billion when it dropped 17 percent on Monday.
We have a perfect representation of the two competing visions for the future of Artificial Intelligence in DeepSeek and Stargate. One is closed and expensive, and it requires placing an ever-increasing amount of money and faith into the hands of OpenAI and its partners. The other is scrappy and open source, but with major questions around the censorship of information, data privacy practices, and whether it’s truly as low-cost as we’re being told.
What is clear is that we’ve entered a new phase in the AI arms race, and DeepSeek and Stargate represent more than just two distinct paths toward superintelligence: they also represent a new, escalating front in the US-China relationship and the geopolitics of AI. This is becoming especially fraught, as President Donald Trump continues to wreak havoc on foreign relations with a new threat of tariffs on foreign semiconductors.
The news cycle is moving fast and there is a lot going on. So to break it all down, I invited Verge senior AI reporter Kylie Robison on the show to discuss all the events of the past couple weeks and to figure out where the AI industry is headed next.
