4 key trends for innovation include speed of emerging technologies and erosion of US leadership
DeepSeek's Deep Shock to US AI Leadership
Paul Gigot interviews Journal columnist Holman Jenkins.
DeepSeek’s new AI model is causing deep consternation from Silicon Valley to Washington. Few would have predicted that a little-known Chinese startup with a couple of hundred homegrown engineers would be able to release a frontier AI model rivaling the capabilities of America’s best and biggest tech companies – reportedly at a fraction of the cost and computational power.
Experts are hotly debating just how many and which type of chips DeepSeek used and whether the company stockpiled them or circumvented U.S. export controls. But the release and viral adoption of a Chinese AI competitor model has already rattled markets, highlighted the urgent competition for global brainpower, and caused some to ask whether all those billions that U.S. tech companies have spent buying chips and building data centers built a competitive moat or a Maginot line.
This moment is game on, not game over. U.S. researchers are already reverse engineering the model and no doubt will be applying DeepSeek’s clever engineering advances to accelerate improvements here at home. But the challenge for the United States goes far beyond engineering. Technology, economics and geopolitics are intersecting in new ways, and seizing the future requires understanding the future.
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Today, a principal foreign policy challenge for the nation is harnessing emerging technologies and understanding their implications faster and better than our adversaries. Technology has always driven geopolitics, from Roman aqueducts to nuclear weapons. But this moment is different: Never have so many transformational technologies changed so much so fast.
China's DeepSeek AI has muddled markets and concerned American policymakers that the US is losing ground on its adversaries. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
Glimpses of the future are already here.
Generative AI is writing much of the world’s computer code and is estimated to add trillions of dollars to the global economy annually – equivalent to the GDP of the United Kingdom.
In what may be a historic first, Ukraine has been waging effective naval warfare without a navy, sinking two dozen Russian warships and denying Russia control of the Black Sea with thousands of homemade drones and other DIY weapons using some parts made from consumer 3D-printers.
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, the first Swiss case came from the Internet, not infected humans. In February 2020, researchers at the University of Bern recreated the virus in just a week, using yeast, published genome sequences from China and mail-order DNA before the first human case was reported in the country.
In today’s globalized economy, technological competition has become a high-stakes geopolitical battleground. We don’t have to guess what America’s adversaries desire or intend. They tell us. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said whoever controls AI will rule the world.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his plans to overtake the U.S. as a technological power, buying, stealing and developing capabilities in everything from synthetic biology to batteries. Last year, China surpassed the U.S. as the nation with the most highly cited scientific publications in the world. And China is doubling down on investment, spending 1.3% of its GDP on research, while U.S. federal spending has shrunk to just 0.65% of GDP.
Sustaining American innovation leadership is essential for the nation’s economy and security. It is also the linchpin for maintaining a dynamic global technology innovation ecosystem and securing its benefits for the U.S. and the world. This new era of technology-driven competition raises critical questions about everything from how America approaches intelligence gathering to how it thinks about and funds basic science research.
Universities can help.
China's leader Xi Jinping wants his nation to take a technological lead ahead of the US. FILE: Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with his China's counterpart Xi Jinping during a signing ceremony following the Russian-Chinese talks on September 11, 2018. (Photo credit should read SERGEI CHIRIKOV/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2023, we joined with Stanford University colleagues to launch the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (SETR), the first-ever collaboration between the School of Engineering and the Hoover Institution. SETR brings together nearly 100 leading science and engineering faculty, social science faculty and policy experts to help decisionmakers understand discoveries in our labs and in the world, as well as their geopolitical implications – at the speed of relevance.
In addition to demystifying technologies and debunking misperceptions, we identify key trends and themes that cut across fields and are often overlooked. Four stand out.
First, "policymakers" are not just government officials. Scientists, engineers, investors and executives are policymakers, too, even if they may not realize it. Every new invention is imbued with policy choices. Early versions of Google’s Gemini AI model did not generate images of female popes and Black Nazis by accident. Google engineers made countering gender and racial bias more of a priority in their algorithmic design than historical accuracy.
DeepSeek’s AI model deliberately avoids discussing any topic that could offend the Chinese Communist Party. As these examples suggest, technology is policy. Washington needs to reframe processes, from who gets intelligence to who gets included, to incorporate a broader set of decision-makers.
Second, the shifting locus of innovation inside the United States has created worrisome intelligence gaps. For decades, technological breakthroughs, including GPS satellites and the Internet, were invented inside government for national security purposes and later commercialized. Now it’s the reverse: innovations typically occur in the academic and commercial sectors and the government is struggling to track and adopt them.
And because U.S. spy agencies have historically faced outward, collecting foreign intelligence, they have never developed a robust capability to determine how U.S. technological advancements compare to those of other nations. The CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are working to narrow these gaps, but the U.S. remains vulnerable to strategic technical surprise. DeepSeek is a near-miss, a surprise that, fortunately, is unlikely to give China sustained advantage. We may not be so lucky next time.
Third, emerging technologies are intersecting and accelerating each other in powerful, often-hidden ways. AI, for example, is poised to revolutionize materials science by screening candidate compounds at superhuman speeds to better predict which ones are most likely to exhibit desirable properties. Materials science is also poised to supercharge AI, by identifying new semiconductors that could be used to develop energy-efficient chips which are essential to reduce the cost of training AI models.
The fourth trend is the long-term erosion of America’s leadership in fundamental research, which is the foundation for future commercial innovation.
Sustaining American innovation leadership is essential for the nation’s economy and security. It is also the linchpin for maintaining a dynamic global technology innovation ecosystem and securing its benefits for the U.S. and the world.
All research is not the same. Applied research is designed to bring products to market – like medicines to cure diseases or computing breakthroughs to make smartphones smarter. Research on the frontiers of knowledge with no foreseeable commercial product, like understanding quantum physics, is called basic or fundamental research. It requires years, sometimes decades, to bear fruit. But without it, commercial innovations would not be possible.
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For example, cryptographic algorithms protecting data on the Internet today stemmed from decades of university research in pure math. Similarly, COVID mRNA vaccines took decades of university research on how mRNA could activate and block protein cells and how it could be delivered to human cells to provoke an immune response before pharmaceutical companies could develop products.
Many AI advances, including ChatGPT, build on pioneering work in university computer science departments that also trained generations of students who went on to found, fund, and lead many of today’s leading tech companies.
But the engine of fundamental research is not running as well as it should. The U.S. government is the only funder capable of making large and risky investments in fundamental research, but federal funding is just one third of what it was in the 1960s.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was supposed to turn the tide by dramatically increasing funding for fundamental research, but major increases were subsequently scrapped in budget negotiations. The U.S. still funds more fundamental research than China does, but Chinese investment is rising six times faster and will overtake the U.S. in a decade if current trends continue.
DeepSeek should spur America to action. The promise of emerging technology is boundless if we have the foresight to understand it and the fortitude to embrace the challenges.
Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-chair of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
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Condoleezza Rice is the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review. She served as U.S. Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009.
