DeepSeek proved that smart ideas and fleet-footedness matter a lot more than gargantuan investments. Does India have the smarts to walk through this door?
| Photo Credit: Rasi Bhadramani
On the last weekend of January, a little-known Chinese company upended the tech world’s established order. DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, rattled Silicon Valley giants and sent shockwaves through global markets after releasing its AI assistant. By the end of the weekend, the AI assistant had topped the downloads chart on both Apple Inc.’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, even straining DeepSeek’s own systems to the point of temporary shutdown.
The frenzy around the AI startup has not died down since then. DeepSeek initially earned plaudits from Silicon Valley heavyweights, including investor Marc Andreessen and AI godfather and chief Meta Platforms Inc. scientist Yann LeCun. Since then, the breakthrough has even been hailed as China’s “Sputnik moment” by some, which explains the recent moves of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which created the AI chatbot ChatGPT, whose very existence DeepSeek now threatens.
Even as this opens a new front in the US-China “cold war”, one might be tempted to ask: where is India in this race? As a recent piece in Frontline pointed out, China has “opened the door to AI innovation” and proved a point to the Silicon Valley czars. Can India show similar initiative and dynamism to matter in the world of AI?
Frontline has curated a set of pieces from its archives that trace the recent evolution of AI as it invades every possible sphere of our everyday lives, while highlighting its impact, be it in terms of privacy, societal inequality, employment, the environment, and many other aspects. Read on.
source: https://frontline.thehindu.com/science-and-technology/china-ai-deepseek-vs-us-tech-future/article69195946.ece
