DeepSeek AI – live: White House ‘looking at’ national security implications of Chinese AI breakthrough

Chinese tech company Alibaba released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday that it claimed surpassed DeepSeek-V3.

The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek‘s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.

“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.

The 10 January release of DeepSeek‘s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the later release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.

But DeepSeek‘s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.

DeepSeek is unable to describe student-led protests against the Chinese government at Tiananmen Square in 1989, replying: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope.”

Remembered euphemistically as the 4 June incident in China, thousands of civilians were killed by the People’s Liberation Army in the summer of 1989 in an attempt to curb student-led pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Chinese media never mentions Tiananmen Square. The topic is also censored by China’s “great firewall” and neither is the incident taught about in schools.

DeepSeek also maintains in its responses that Taiwan has been an “inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times.”

As many users testing the chatbot pointed out, in its response to queries about Taiwan’s sovereignty, the AI strangely uses the first-person pronoun “we” while sharing the Chinese Communist Party’s stance.

“We firmly believe that under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, through joint efforts of all Chinese sons and daughters, the complete reunification of the motherland is an unstoppable historical trend,” DeepSeek replies.

The recruitment of thousands of new AI experts by the government and private sector is part of a 50-point plan to transform Britain with the new technology.

Liang Wenfeng, the 39-year-old founder of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, has become the face of China’s tech industry despite historically keeping a low profile.

He has primarily kept out of the public eye, although in an interview with Chinese media last year, he said: “Our principle is not to lose money, nor to make huge profits … our starting point is not to take advantage of the opportunity to make a fortune, but to be at the forefront of technology and promote the development of the entire ecosystem.”

As well as founding the startup, Liang co-founded quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer which funds DeepSeek.

Read the full report from Vishwam Sankaran here:

DeepSeek’s development shows why the UK must “go furthering faster to remove barriers for innovation” in the AI sector, says Downing Street.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesperson said: “The rapid development and breakthrough of new AI models demonstrates exactly why the UK is so focused on AI and why we need to go further and faster to remove barriers to innovation here to make the UK a more competitive market.

“And whilst we’ve already got the third largest AI market in the world, we’ve got an opportunity to get ahead and do more, and that’s what our AI Opportunities action plan is all about.”