China’s DeepSeek, a rising force in artificial intelligence, is gaining global attention for its open-weight AI models and recent partnership talks with Russia. Chinese computer scientist and politician Lou Qinjian praised DeepSeek for sharing AI innovation with the world. At the same time, U.S. Vice President JD Vance voiced concern over foreign regimes using AI to control data and rewrite history. As China and Russia strengthen AI ties, Western nations are facing growing pressure to keep up in the fast-changing tech race.
DeepSeek: China’s Affordable Answer to AI Development
DeepSeek stunned the global tech world in January by introducing low-cost, high-performance AI models. Based in Hangzhou, the company revealed that it created its flagship AI model with just $6 million and 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs.
By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 reportedly cost over $100 million and used 16,000 GPUs. Meta’s LLaMA 3 also needed a much higher budget and computing power. DeepSeek’s efficiency has opened the door for smaller companies to compete in the AI field.
How DeepSeek’s Tech Is Different
DeepSeek’s AI uses reinforcement learning and multi-head latent attention (MHLA), a technique that cuts memory usage from 13% to just 5%. This means smaller models can do tasks that once needed huge AI systems.
DeepSeek also skipped the need for supervised fine-tuning. This lets developers build faster and more flexibly. However, it’s important to note that DeepSeek shares its model weights but not the source code. This makes it harder to check how the AI was trained or what data was used.
Open Weight vs. Open Source
DeepSeek is open-weight—not truly open-source. Open-source AI shares the full code and data, while open-weight models share only trained model weights. This means developers can build on DeepSeek’s models, but they don’t know exactly what’s behind them.
Many AI developers worldwide have started examining DeepSeek’s technology. But concerns remain about the origin of the training data and whether it respects data privacy or copyright laws.
A Growing Strategic Alliance: China and Russia
China and Russia are moving closer in the AI space. Russia’s Sberbank, the country’s largest bank, is planning joint AI research with Chinese scientists. Sberbank has already launched its own AI model, GigaChat, and wants to boost development with help from China.
Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy CEO of Sberbank, said, “Sberbank has many scientists. Through them, we plan to conduct joint research projects with researchers from China.” This statement highlights a new chapter in the AI arms race.
Both nations have described their relationship as a “no limits” partnership. While the exact details of their AI cooperation are unclear, experts believe the collaboration could include military technology.
U.S. Responds: Guarding AI Leadership
In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, U.S. Vice President JD Vance made the Biden administration’s position clear. He emphasized that the U.S. must remain the top global partner for AI development.
“We want American AI to be the gold standard around the world,” Vance said. He also stressed that the U.S. will push for policies that help AI grow without excessive regulation. “Too much red tape could kill this new industry before it even gets started,” he warned.
Vance also raised red flags about foreign governments using AI for censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. “These regimes use stolen AI tools to collect personal data and spread false messages,” he said.
He cautioned other countries about working with authoritarian tech providers. “When you partner with them, you risk tying your nation’s infrastructure to regimes that want control,” Vance added.
A Turning Point for Global AI
DeepSeek’s success has forced Western tech firms to rethink their strategies. With lower costs and faster development cycles, open-weight AI models are changing the game.
At the same time, the U.S. is pushing for trustworthy, democratic AI systems. These two paths—open, low-cost AI from China, and private, ethics-based AI from the West—are shaping the future of technology.
The U.S. and its allies are now racing to keep pace with DeepSeek while defending their own values and data security.
