Last Monday January 27, Wall Street and the Media were in a big hullabaloo because a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, showed its chops with AI. They had a ChatGPT-like app similar to that of Nivida.

There were a couple of responses. One from Nivida welcoming competition; OPEN AI claimed that DeepSeek “stole” their data.

Here in the US, we are scared that China, among other nations, will lead AI advances. Our response to date has been to hold back some of our technology, believing, incorrectly that this will solve our problem. But this battle has been here for some time.

The Chinese government declared that they would be the leaders in AI back in 2018!

Eric Topol, in his book Deep Medicine, spoke about this. His book was published in 2019 and he probably worked on it for a least a year.

China is just behind the US in patents, and they are training many engineers in AI, especially in image and speech recognition. They have made numerous advances in AI in health, for example.

So why are we surprised? A little foresight would have seen this coming. I only am using Topol’s book, but there were other articles on AI advances from China.

What ought to surprise us more is that DeepSeek trained its model for $5.6 million. Meta announced they would dedicate $65 billion this year.

My friends, it ain’t the money, but the brains that foster change.