Tyler Cowen and Geoffrey Cain talk DeepSeek, OpenAI and Cold War II.
By Bari Weiss
THE FREE PRESS
February 6, 2025
Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then, out of nowhere, a totally unknown Chinese start-up turned that assumption—and the American stock market—on its head.
DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available OpenAI products. And they did it despite America’s prohibition on shipping our state of the art microchips to China.
America was caught flat-footed, asking: How did this even happen? And could we actually lose this tech war?
Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the term hard drive, don’t worry. Bari has invited two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, an AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog, Marginal Revolution. He is the author of over a dozen books, but frankly, we’ve lost count. He is joined today by Geoffrey Cain, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.
Bari speaks to them about how this happened, and what it means. Is it a twenty-first-century Sputnik moment? And if so, is China now officially ahead of us in the AI race?
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