Use DeepSeek? China knows your secrets. Plus, how many times a week you’re secretly recorded, why Apple and Samsung are being sued, and how much Amazon’s upgraded Alexa will cost you.
What you need to know about DeepSeek
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I’ve been saying it for years: The country that masters AI will dominate the world economically, politically and militarily. Since ChatGPT dropped, the U.S. seemed untouchable. Most of us Americans assumed we were a couple of years ahead of China in terms of AI, but the game has changed — and fast.
The latest version of DeepSeek AI, an open-source model out of China, is so good, it tanked U.S. tech stock prices (Nvidia lost $593 billion in value!), shot to No. 1 in the Apple App Store overnight and now has the entire world wondering, “If this is what China is showing us, what’s next?”
Move over, OpenAI
DeepSeek was founded in May 2023 in Zhejiang, China. Its first models were nothing to write home about; the latest release, DeepSeek-V3, is another story.
It was developed in just 55 days, trained on 671 billion parameters and performs as well as (or better than) Meta’s Llama, OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 in math, coding and reasoning. Let that sink in. It took China just two months to beat the American giants.
The money is where it gets really interesting. OpenAI spent $5 billion on its model in just one year. Google shelled out $50 billion on AI development in 2024. Microsoft has invested $13 billion into AI partnerships.
What about DeepSeek? They spent $5.6 million. It’s a cheap Chinese knockoff.
How’d they do it?
China put together a group of young, ambitious, super-smart engineers and researchers who worked under strict limitations. The official story is they couldn’t use Nvidia’s top-tier H100 chips because of U.S. export restrictions. Instead, they worked with less powerful H800 chips.
Rumors suggest China started with over 10,000 super-powered H100 Nvidia AI chips purchased before the Biden administration’s sanctions kicked in. There are also whispers they stole OpenAI’s code as the foundation for DeepSeek-V3.
But here’s the thing: Even if they took someone else’s code, it doesn’t matter anymore. DeepSeek runs efficiently on far fewer chips, uses less electricity and is cheaper to operate than its American counterparts.
The real game-changer is right here
February 8th, 2025
Temu is planting seeds for something: A Texas man ordered a dog toy from China-owned Temu but received seeds instead. It’s the fifth suspicious package reported in the state. One was an invasive plant species. If you receive seeds in the mail, don’t throw them away or plant them. Report it to your state’s Department of Agriculture.
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Solution the French-governed AI chatbot gave to 5(3+2). (The answer is 25.) The bot, Lucie, also said, “Cow’s eggs, also known as chicken’s eggs, are edible eggs produced by cows.” The bot is offline now. So, to recap, we need to worry about China in the AI race and definitely not France. Noted.
💰 Silicon Valley’s unicorns fly: The venture capitalists are upset. Communist China’s DeepSeek AI is 30 times cheaper to run than its American counterparts. In an interview, DeepSeek’s founder said he didn’t mean to start a price war; AI should simply be affordable for everyone. Oh, and he thinks AGI (that’s “artificial general intelligence,” when AI becomes smarter than humans and makes its own decisions) is two years away. Sleep well.
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Forty-two lawmakers are suing Meta, saying it’s harming children — I have the details. Plus, a car insurer denies a woman’s car because it’s a Kia. A Ring cam saves a teen from a bear, and bootleg weight loss drugs are coming in from China. That and much more, plus all your calls and questions.