Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, told the FT that the rapid adoption of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s technology in emerging markets such as Africa underscores the competition American firms face around the world.
His comments come as new research from Microsoft found that the release of DeepSeek’s R1 large language model a year ago helped accelerate the uptake of AI worldwide, particularly in the global south, due to its “accessibility and low cost”.
That has also led to China overtaking the US in the global market for so-called “open” AI models, which are often free to use, modify and integrate by developers.
Right, so DeepSeek proved that you can make slop more efficiently and at a lower cost than what the American companies are doing, which obviously is a threat to the massive amounts of money that they’re pretending to throw around. If you can make it more efficient you won’t need billions for data centres, or trillions for GPUs.
So I can see how this is a problem for Big Slop.
Die mad about it.