Scale AI CEO Says China Has Quickly Caught the US With DeepSeek

The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta, said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an 'earth-shattering model' on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model.

'What we've found is that DeepSeek... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,' Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an 'AI war,' adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. 'The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,' Wang said, later adding, 'We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom.' DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their 'side project.'

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