"WAKE UP" Kevin O'Leary comments on Deepseek AI and China-US relations 

In a fiery Instagram post, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary didn't mince words about China's latest AI venture, Deepseek. O'Leary declared:

"The U.S. is in an economic war with China—whether you see it or not,"

He compares Deepseek to previous Chinese tech exports like TikTok and Lemon8, which he labeled as "Trojan horses for data collection." His message culminated in a stark warning:

"Would China ever let us do the same to them? Not a chance. So why are we letting them do it here? WAKE UP America."

O'Leary's worries are in line with the Chinese platform's claims of performance that is on par with or better than that of Google and OpenAI, two of the biggest names in the AI space. In a single day, the startup's news devastated Wall Street, depleting Nvidia's market worth by $600 billion.

Growing tensions between the US and China over technological dominance, particularly in the AI space, provide a backdrop for the drama.

Deepseek and its implications for the American tech sector

With a twist, Deepseek is China's version of ChatGPT. With a 97% success rate in coding jobs, its most recent models, V3 and R1, demonstrate remarkable skills.

Without holding back, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen referred to the platform's launch as "America's Sputnik moment."

The plot thickens when it comes to the hardware behind its success. While the company claims to use older Nvidia A100 GPUs and export-compliant H800 chips, some industry experts aren't buying it.

Scale AI's CEO Alexandr Wang dropped a bombshell:

"My understanding is that DeepSeek has about 50,000 H100s which they can't talk about, obviously, because it is against the export controls that the United States has put in place."

In an ironic twist, AI developer Reuven Cohen points out that the Chinese platform embraces open-source principles while American champion OpenAI is becoming increasingly restrictive.

"OpenAI is now by far, the most closed in every way possible," Cohen notes.

The debate on export control of American chips

Some experts argue that US export restrictions have backfired spectacularly. Angela Zhang, a law professor at USC, writes:

"China's achievements in efficiency are no direct response to the escalating export restrictions imposed by the US and its allies... By limiting China's access to advanced AI chips, the US has inadvertently spurred its innovation."

However, AI policy expert Miles Brundage offers a different perspective:

"Everyone would much prefer to have more compute for training, running more experiments, sampling from a model more times... American companies are currently in a better position to do that because of their greater volume and quantity of chips."

While O'Leary's warnings echo through social media and Nvidia investors nurse their wounds, the true implications of Deepseek's emergence remain unclear. What's certain is that this development has added another layer to the complex technological rivalry between the US and China.

Whether the Chinese platform represents a genuine technological leap or, as O'Leary suggests, a more concerning development in data collection and AI supremacy, remains to be seen. But one thing's clear: the AI race between the US and China is heating up, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

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Meta has reportedly set up multiple "war rooms" to analyze how China’s AI startup Deepseek achieves competitive efficiency at a fraction of the cost.