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Opinion|The Dangerous A.I. Nonsense That Trump and Biden Fell For
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/ai-deepseek-trump-biden.html
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Zeynep Tufekci
Feb. 5, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
China’s tech industry recently gave the U.S. tech industry — and along with it, the stock market — a rude shock when it unveiled DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence model that performs on par with America’s best, but that may have been developed at a fraction of the cost and despite trade restrictions on A.I. chips.
Since then there have been a lot of frantic attempts to figure out how they did it and whether it was all above board. Those are not the most important questions, and the excessive focus on them is an example of precisely how we got caught off guard in the first place.
The real lesson of DeepSeek is that America’s approach to A.I. safety and regulations — the concerns espoused by both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as by many A.I. companies — was largely nonsense. It was never going to be possible to contain the spread of this powerful emergent technology, and certainly not just by placing trade restrictions on components like graphic chips. That was a self-serving fiction, foisted on out-of-touch leaders by an industry that wanted the government to kneecap its competitors.
Instead of a futile effort to keep this genie bottled up, the government and the industry should be preparing our society for the sweeping changes that are soon to come.
The misguided focus on containment is a belated echo of the nuclear age, when the United States and others limited the spread of atomic bombs by restricting access to enriched uranium, by keeping an eye on what certain scientists were doing and by sending inspectors into labs and military bases. Those measures, backed up by the occasional show of force, had a clear effect. The world hasn’t blown up — yet.
One crucial difference, however, is that nuclear weapons could have been developed only by a few specialized scientists at the leading edge of their fields. The core idea that powers the artificial intelligence revolution, on the other hand, has been around since the 1940s. What opened the floodgates was the arrival first of vast data sets (via the internet and other digital technologies) and then of powerful graphic processors (like the ones from Nvidia), which can compute A.I. models from those data troves.
