Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Christinamiot.
Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, January twenty nine. Athletics Australia has lashed at
Speaker 1: the Western Australian Institute of Sport for its treatment of
Speaker 1: a pole volt coach who blew the whistle on sexual
Speaker 1: assault allegations. Chair Jane Fleming and CEO Simon Hollingsworth have
Speaker 1: called for the WA body to better support whistle blow
Speaker 1: up Paul Burgess and reinstate his training privileges. New Zealand's
Speaker 1: Resources minister has launched an attack on banks that refuse
Speaker 1: to finance minds on the eve of the release of
Speaker 1: his government's mineral strategy. Shane Jones also backed at the
Speaker 1: Fijian PM in saying Australia's not to blame for climate change.
Speaker 1: Those exclusive stories are live right now at the Australian
Speaker 1: dot Com dot Au. Science Minister Ed Husick says a
Speaker 1: new Chinese AI platform comes with national security concerns, and
Speaker 1: he says he'll take advice from intelligence experts on any
Speaker 1: potential threats. Deep Seek sent shockwaves through the tech industry
Speaker 1: and financial markets this week. So what is it and
Speaker 1: where's it sending the AI race. That's today's episode. Last week,
Speaker 1: on the frenzied first day of his new presidential term,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump announced a multi billion dollar commitment to artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence infrastructure.
Speaker 2: These world leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate,
Speaker 2: a new American company that will invest five hundred billion
Speaker 2: dollars at least in AI infrastructure in the United States,
Speaker 2: creating over one hundred thousand are jobs.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately about the same time, on the other side
Speaker 1: of the planet, a Chinese company called deep Seek unveiled
Speaker 1: an AI model it says can compete with market leaders
Speaker 1: like Chat GPT for a fraction of the cost. The
Speaker 1: world's financial markets reacted with shock and awe with Navidia,
Speaker 1: the world's most valuable public company and the maker of
Speaker 1: the computer chips most American AI models rely on bearing
Speaker 1: the brunt of it Well, shairs of Santa Clara's in
Speaker 1: video fell hard this morning on the popularity of a
Speaker 1: new Chinese artificial intelligence advancement. Deepseek is impressive enough, but
Speaker 1: it made people wonder, do you really need those Nvidia
Speaker 1: AI chaps?
Speaker 2: That's the whole question, right, I mean ignoring the fact
Speaker 2: that a number of reports.
Speaker 3: That I think it caught everyone off guard, even the
Speaker 3: best and brightest in Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: Jared Lynch is The Australian's Technology editor.
Speaker 3: They thought the US was miles ahead, not even miles ahead,
Speaker 3: thousands of miles ahead than China. They had a trade
Speaker 3: embargo on Navidia chips, the world's most advanced chips. And
Speaker 3: then the fact that China could produce at a far
Speaker 3: lower costs, mind you, an AI model that is almost on.
Speaker 4: Par with chat GPT was extraordinary.
Speaker 1: The AI model released by deep Seek is called R one.
Speaker 1: It's a generative AI platform similar to Chat GPT and
Speaker 1: Meta AI. Deep Seek is backed by Leoon Wen Fung.
Speaker 1: He's the manager of the eight billion dollar hedge fund
Speaker 1: high Flyer. The company says it forked out just under
Speaker 1: nine million Australian dollars to train R one, and says
Speaker 1: it did it without Navidia's top of the line computer chips.
Speaker 1: By comparison, the most recent iteration of chat GPT cost
Speaker 1: around one hundred million dollars to train before it was
Speaker 1: released in November, and deep seeks model is open source,
Speaker 1: meaning other developers can adopt and adapt it. For their
Speaker 1: own purposes, hence the financial panic. Jared was that market
Speaker 1: reaction proportionate?
Speaker 4: Do you think time will tell?
Speaker 3: There have been some analysts that have called bs to
Speaker 3: put it politely on deep seaks claims that is that
Speaker 3: it only cost five point six million US to train
Speaker 3: this model, whereas some US models have cost billions to
Speaker 3: train because there's just not enough data to show. Okay,
Speaker 3: how much does this cost to train? And how much
Speaker 3: do the data centers cost to run deep seats? So
Speaker 3: that's all unknown at this stage. At the moment, the
Speaker 3: market's caught up in Wow, China's actually delivered this AI model.
Speaker 3: What risk does that pose to the big American companies
Speaker 3: that have invested billions in creating this tech.
Speaker 4: But the thing is we've got to.
Speaker 3: Rewind the clock back a little bit to the fifties,
Speaker 3: to the sixties, even the early seventies, off the space race,
Speaker 3: the US against Russia. That didn't result in a pullback
Speaker 3: off investment. I mean, competition rarely does it becomes a battle.
Speaker 3: Billions of dollars, trillions of dollars get poured into gaining
Speaker 3: the upper hand, and that is what we're going.
Speaker 4: To see in the AI race.
Speaker 3: What the response has been, more broadly, is this is
Speaker 3: very much now game on. China is saying to the
Speaker 3: world that it can compete and at a far lower cost.
Speaker 3: In fact, that's almost embarrassing to the American companies which
Speaker 3: have spent billions and billions of dollars of investor funds
Speaker 3: on developing and training these sophisticated AI models.
Speaker 1: Deep six founders say they've tested are one against models
Speaker 1: from open Ai, which owns chat GPT, and they say
Speaker 1: it holds up. Jared, You've spent some time in the
Speaker 1: last week playing around with deep siks are one AI model.
Speaker 1: What did you think? Is it actually good? Yeah?
Speaker 3: And the most part it is it works just like
Speaker 3: chat GBT, in some cases even better. It provides lengthy,
Speaker 3: balanced explanations to queries. For example, if you say if
Speaker 3: Trump is a good leader, it'll say whether he's a
Speaker 3: good leader is subjective. Here's some arguments, or here's some
Speaker 3: arguments against. Here some neutral arguments, and this is a conclusion.
Speaker 3: So it sort of directs the user to make up
Speaker 3: their own mind.
Speaker 4: The problem is.
Speaker 3: It's AI veers into what I call autocratic intelligence, and
Speaker 3: by that I mean it acts as an extension of
Speaker 3: China's Communist Party, because if you ask any questions about China,
Speaker 3: it adheres to China's censorship laws. So if you say,
Speaker 3: what is the Tianaman Square massacre, it'll say, sorry, that's
Speaker 3: beyond my current scope.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about something else.
Speaker 3: So it's very much a pro China model, or as
Speaker 3: I like to call it, autocratic intelligence.
Speaker 1: Do you think that, in adhering to the Communist government's
Speaker 1: rules around censorship, Deep Seek could actually count itself out
Speaker 1: of this race before it's really even begun.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think many people will realize because on
Speaker 3: the whole it will act like a chap GBT. Why
Speaker 3: it matters when people ask questions about China is that
Speaker 3: is where people are getting their information. I mean, we
Speaker 3: used to have libraries, and then Google came along and
Speaker 3: people got their information from Google, and now increasingly people
Speaker 3: want their information via AI summaries. And the fact that
Speaker 3: it is pro China, I think that's almost going to
Speaker 3: become irrelevant because if it gets what they call the
Speaker 3: multiplier effect, where it gets a huge user base, people
Speaker 3: won't realize that they're actually being fed a pro China message,
Speaker 3: and that is a really, really big concern.
Speaker 1: Coming up? What next for the AI race? Back in
Speaker 1: the White House, an advisor to President Donald Trump reportedly
Speaker 1: said the cheap generative AI model released last week by
Speaker 1: deep Seek was one of the most impressive breakthroughs he'd
Speaker 1: ever seen. In many ways, it's an escalation in the
Speaker 1: competition between the United States and China to win the
Speaker 1: AI race, a fact Trump was upfront about at the
Speaker 1: Stargate announcement.
Speaker 2: This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in
Speaker 2: America's potential. What we want to do is we want
Speaker 2: to keep it in this country. China as a competitor
Speaker 2: and others are competitors. We wanted to be in this country.
Speaker 1: So as Deepzick races to the top of app stores
Speaker 1: around the globe, what happens next?
Speaker 3: Here's Jared Lynch, Well, it shows now that the US
Speaker 3: no longer has the monopoly on AI development. In China,
Speaker 3: we've seen strong entrepreneurial culture which has created some of
Speaker 3: the world's biggest companies. Just look at Ali Barber for example,
Speaker 3: And now people are saying, wow, we can do the
Speaker 3: same with a bit of an ounce there is another
Speaker 3: way to be a disruptor, and we no longer have
Speaker 3: to have the deep pockets of Silicon Valley. Anyone can
Speaker 3: now take advantage of this technology and be a David
Speaker 3: taken on the goliaths.
Speaker 1: Elsewhere, and especially in parts of Europe, deepzek has been
Speaker 1: welcomed with open arms by developers who say it's put
Speaker 1: them in a position to compete. And just lastly, Jared
Speaker 1: on the flip side, does that risk creating a marketplace
Speaker 1: where small are already established operations actually can't compete or
Speaker 1: is that just natural selection?
Speaker 3: I think it'll be a bit of both. We're going
Speaker 3: to see some smaller operators be weeded out for a
Speaker 3: variety of reasons. Call that natural selection. And then we're
Speaker 3: going to see a wholely of smaller operators come up
Speaker 3: in areas that otherwise we had never thought of before,
Speaker 3: as we've seen with deep Seek. So we are entering
Speaker 3: uncharted territory, almost like the wild West. And it's been
Speaker 3: even made more so by Donald Trump's decision to rescind
Speaker 3: an executive order of Joe Biden's which gave the government
Speaker 3: too much control of AI. So the message from Trump
Speaker 3: is telling us companies to go forth and innovate and
Speaker 3: do it quickly.
Speaker 4: I've got your back because I.
Speaker 3: Want the US to be the AI leaders, and that
Speaker 3: means we've all got to buckle up.
Speaker 1: Jared Lynch is The Australian's Technology editor. You can read
Speaker 1: all our reporting on artificial intelligence and technology right now
Speaker 1: at the Australian dot com dot au