DeepSeek's Open-Source Surge Cracks America's AI Illusions

China's DeepSeek is proving that open-source AI can flourish, while the West is hitting back by raising familiar security concerns.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

What to make of this week's DeepSeek freakout? For those of us in Singapore and across Asia, it's been almost surreal watching the Western tech world's collective anxiety attack.

A Chinese artificial intelligence start-up on a shoestring budget matches ChatGPT's capabilities while using fewer chips, and nearly a trillion dollars vanishes from US and European tech stocks.

Silicon Valley calls it a "Sputnik moment", while an overexcited Chinese commentator dubs it a "Pearl Harbor attack" on Western AI dominance.

But strip away the drama, and the real story isn't about US-China rivalry or Silicon Valley's supposed downfall. Instead, it's a vindication of one of the West's greatest contributions to modern computer technology: open-source software.

By allowing developers to freely access and modify source code - which is basically a program's DNA - open-source principles have quietly shaped much of modern proprietary tech, from the Android operating system to Amazon's cloud services.

DeepSeek's rise illustrates just how powerful this approach can be.

While America's biggest tech firms pour billions into proprietary AI models, hoping to build unassailable moats, DeepSeek - operating on a fraction of those budgets - has tapped into existing open-source tools to match the best in the field.

It seems of the AI majors, only Meta - the one that embraces open-source - truly grasps how game-changing it is.

Mr Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman and CEO, put it bluntly in a Washington Post commentary: "It's a peculiar moment when a Chinese company becomes the de facto open-source leader, while most major American firms, with the exception of Meta, continue to keep their methodologies tightly under wraps."

That sense of inevitability - that open-source technology can't be fenced in by national borders or corporate policies - is what's unsettling Silicon Valley.