Besides the founder, the only real external investor for DeepSeek is Chinese govt. there are literally zero revenue pressure compare to O, A & G.
To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production", which they are sort of doing, but in such an incompetent way that I'm afraid we will probably end up mixing the worst of both communism and capitalism.
> To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production"
No they don't. The U.S. Government is free to launch their own AI labs if they wish -- and even compete with the private sector -- but that doesn't mean they have to confiscate existing investments and capital. But Congress is unlikely to do that, because we've learned in the course of history that in well-functioning competitive markets, publicly-operated services tend to be worse than private ones across multiple dimensions.
Chinese companies are largely where they are not because they're state funded, but because they operate in ways that would be considered criminal in the U.S. If they didn't constantly trespass on OpenAI and Anthropic to try to achieve product and technological parity, they would be too far behind to produce innovative research.
China is just taking a lot of ideas from the USG when it was doing things correctly and is using those for innovation.
In this case, it feels like they are just funding multiple independent pure research projects and letting the chips fall where they may.
Doesn't even really seem like Europe can coordinate that.