7 February 2025
China’s AI Evolution: DeepSeek and National Security
DeepSeek R1 proves that algorithmic ingenuity, not raw compute, can match frontier AI performance, and the geopolitical and security implications of that discovery are only beginning to sink in.
When DeepSeek dropped R1 in January 2025, it didn't just release a model — it released a question: how did a Chinese lab build an OpenAI-competitive reasoning system at a fraction of the cost, despite US chip export controls? This report cuts through the hype to explain how DeepSeek R1 actually works, why its innovative mix of Mixture of Experts architecture, Reinforcement Learning, and lean engineering is less of a bolt-from-the-blue than it first appeared, and what it signals for the broader field. We survey the wave of Chinese model releases that accompanied it — Kimi k1.5, Doubao-1.5-Pro, Spark X1 — and examine the commercial, geopolitical, and security implications of a world where capable, open-weight, non-Western AI is freely available, cheap to run, and increasingly hard to ignore.
Read the article here