Unlike the ‘Sputnik moment’ in 1957, there probably won’t be a ‘DeepSeek moment’ in the US

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/01/29/unlike-the-sputnik-moment-in-1957-there-probably-won-t-be-a-deepseek-moment-in-the-us_6737544_23.html

Posted by LeMonde_en

7 comments

  1. **Le Monde columnist Sylvie Kauffmann looks back at the Soviet launch of the satellite in 1957, and President Eisenhower’s counteroffensive in favor of science and education, to understand why Trump’s US is unlikely to adopt the same approach to stay ahead of China.**

    Will the United States experience a “DeepSeek moment” as it had a “Sputnik moment” nearly 70 years ago? The question has inevitably arisen in recent days, following the surprise success of an app produced by a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, DeepSeek, which appears to be overturning the business model of its major American rivals and casting doubt on the technological supremacy of the US in its great competition with China.

    Roughly speaking, DeepSeek does as well as its rival ChatGPT, but with 50 times fewer resources, particularly in terms of energy. And it’s produced without the state-of-the-art chips that Chinese tech companies do not have access to because of the US embargo on the most advanced semiconductors.

    In Hangzhou, a city of over eight million on China’s east coast, home to numerous tech companies, DeepSeek employees deserted their modest offices for the traditional Chinese New Year vacation on Tuesday, January 28, a world away from the shockwaves that are shaking two pillars of American capitalism on the other side of the planet: Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

    On Wall Street, the share prices of semiconductor manufacturers, digital giants and future energy companies plummeted: A “bloodbath,” [in the words of the Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/the-day-deepseek-turned-tech-and-wall-street-upside-down-f2a70b69). Tech executives tried to put on a brave face in the face of this humiliating demonstration of technological prowess achieved with a much lower budget. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, which produces ChatGPT, conceded that DeepSeek’s first steps were “impressive.” US President Donald Trump got straight to the point: Here was a “wake-up call” that he hoped would be “positive,” as long as manufacturers learned from it that they could achieve the same result without “spending billions and billions.”

    **Read the full article here:** [**https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/01/29/unlike-the-sputnik-moment-in-1957-there-probably-won-t-be-a-deepseek-moment-in-the-us_6737544_23.html**](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/01/29/unlike-the-sputnik-moment-in-1957-there-probably-won-t-be-a-deepseek-moment-in-the-us_6737544_23.html)

  2. This seems like some strange click-bait written by someone who fundamentally misunderstands the huge inherent differences between the space race almost 70 years ago to current AI developments.

    The reality is Deepseek made marginal improvements over US based AI, which are able to be replicated in relative straightforward manners (and many US top models aren’t released publicly yet anyways so it’s hard to really gauge where they are at). The market sold off largely as AI stuff was already believed by many to be a bit of a bubble, and this was a good excuse for a correction.

    AI was always going to be this way, you can’t compare it to large scale infra/hardware developments, and the whole premise here is wrong. Journos, do better.

  3. In Kai-fu Lee’s “AI Superpowers” he mentions that AlphaGo was China’s sputnik moment. In some sense, I believe him. The excerpt is available here.

    [https://asiasociety.org/magazine/article/chinas-sputnik-moment-and-sino-american-battle-ai-supremacy](https://asiasociety.org/magazine/article/chinas-sputnik-moment-and-sino-american-battle-ai-supremacy)

    I don’t think the experts here need a sputnik moment. In many fields we can see the increasingly compelling quality of the work coming out of China. But the American people still drastically underestimate Chinese scientists. I am worried that we are going into this competition with our people being complacent with funding, societal support, and desire.

  4. Americans were deathly afraid of being nuked into communists by the USSR in the 1950s. It’s understandable why they would react the way they did back then. Is anyone afraid that Deepseek is gonna nuke em into a CCP cyborg?

  5. The leadership is different (Eisenhower vs Trump), the willingness to spend money is different (public funds vs spearheaded by private money), the administration is distracted, and the country is less United. Not surprised it’s not a Sputnik moment

  6. I see a bunch of people here trying to boost confidence for nvidia stocks. is this r/wallstreetbets ?

    relax, you don’t have to slander deepseek for nvidia stock to rise, the need for chips are still going to increase. your savings wont evaporate.

  7. Searches thread for the word “open source”, closes thread because it’s another astroturf post pretending like Deepseek wasn’t fake news created by Wall Street to get highly discounted AI stocks.

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