China is focusing most of its AI on other things. China is already starting to experiment with dark factories, which are fully autonomous factories with (almost) no human supervision. Chinese scientists completely dominate AI academic papers. There's much more to AI than some shitty chatbot. China pretty much already surpassed the US on application of AI that actually matter, and DeepSeek is just China dabbing on the West and going, "we can also design a better chatbot too."

A lot of it boils down to the fact that the US has been so thoroughly de-industrialized that much of AI's actual application, which is streamlining industrial processes, has no real use case in a "post"-industrial society, so AI within the US just means a shitty drawing and spaghetti code generator. AI is largely a toy and a curiosity on a consumer level, but it's very different within an industrial context. Part of the reason why AI had such large energy consumption was because it was being put to use for something that should never be used by AI, akin to shoving a circular peg in a square hole. AI is terrible for creations that require human creativity and ingenuity like art, but it's perfect for decreasing industrial inefficiencies by 2.5% or increasing industrial outputs by 32%. I wouldn't use AI to code or edit a movie, but I would use AI to optimize printing paper distribution so that my fleet of 200+ printers will never run out of printing paper.

This is just a test run. They're trying out DeepSeek to streamline some boring bureaucratic processes in Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China and Guangzhou, a city that exists within the same metropolitan area as Shenzhen. I mean, if there's any place to try out some fancy technological gizmo, it would be Shenzhen.

I'd argue that misunderstanding of the capabilities of machine learning systems stems directly from the hype created by capitalists to promote them.