It’s hard to talk about 21st-century economic history without discussing the “China shock”. That is the term often used to describe China’s entrance into the global market, a change that brought rich countries an abundance of cheap goods, but left entire industries and workforces mothballed.
DeepSeek may provide a sequel. A little-known Chinese hedge fund has thrown a grenade into the world of artificial intelligence with a large language model that, in effect, matches the market leader, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, at a fraction of the cost. And while OpenAI treats its models’ workings as proprietary, DeepSeek’s R1 wears its technical innards on the outside, making it attractive for developers to use and build on.