“IS THE US SPENDING TOO MUCH?”
Trump had also argued that the DeepSeek development could be positive for US tech giants, saying they could “spend less” and “come up with hopefully the same solution”.
Wang noted that DeepSeek rattled markets and triggered questions about whether the US is spending too much.
Shares in Nvidia fell nearly 17 per cent on Monday, erasing almost US$600 billion of its market value – the deepest one-day loss for a company on Wall Street.
“Is the US spending too much? Are we spending too much on data? Can we do this with less energy? And that’s the right question to ask, because we want to see technology costs come down over time,” said Wang.
He also pointed out an advantage in AI that China has over America – energy capacity.
“We’re talking about thousands of gigawatts of coal-fired plants. We’ve got small modular nuclear reactors, and we’ve got nuclear reactors and hydro that are coming online, which makes China probably the lowest-cost producer of electricity in the future,” he added.
In recent times, Silicon Valley has put big money into nuclear energy projects to achieve ambitious AI plans, which require power-intensive data centres.
DeepSeek has also put pressure on big tech firms to show their cost effectiveness to customers, given that it appears to have found a way to deliver AI at a fraction of the cost with open-source models, said Wang.
“That’s what we’re all hoping for in the AI world, because unlike the internet right now, AI is closed, it’s centralised, it’s expensive, and there are few players,” he added.
“If we were trying to get an internet-level explosion, you need decentralised and open; you need cheaper, and a lot more players to be able to be in this model. What (DeepSeek has) shown is that this is possible.”
Source: CNA
