China's DeepSeek AI chatbot has shocked the tech world, claiming to be as good or better than U.S. rivals like OpenAI and doing it for a fraction of the cost. But the development has raised questions about how effective U.S. export controls on China have been, and stoked fears over national security. For more, TaiwanPlus spoke to Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Matt Pearl.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Over there at CSIS, you recently released a report on DeepSeek and its geopolitical implications, including some previously unreported information about chip smuggling and the specific technologies that they're using.
00:15So for our audience, maybe just remind us a little bit about why DeepSeek caused such a panic when it first came out and also the main findings of this report.
00:27Before DeepSeek came out, we thought that the non-PRC companies like Meta and Anthropic and OpenAI really had moats, which means that they were protected against other AI players because of the scale of the investments they could make, their access to very high-end chips, and their ability to consume energy.
00:53And so we thought that all of those things really meant that it would be difficult or impossible for PRC companies to do the same.
01:02And what we discovered with DeepSeek is that the PRC companies are becoming very innovative.
01:10We saw this with Huawei, right, where they were cut off from Western chips.
01:13Some of them are smuggled in, obviously, or they obtain illicitly.
01:18But the reality is that they also get very creative about using lower-end chips in order to do these workloads and to make advancements.
01:27And so in the case of DeepSeek, we saw basically them leveraging the same sorts of techniques that Huawei did in terms of using these lower-end chips very efficiently.
01:37And so it does raise questions about the effectiveness of export controls.
01:41Where are U.S. export controls effective at slowing down Chinese AI development, and where do they seem to sort of be failing at that goal?
01:52So I would say that it's not clear that the export controls are slowing down development significantly.
02:00I think if you look at what the export controls do, they impose costs, meaning that it's more expensive.
02:06It can be challenging for the PRC.
02:11They have to find workarounds.
02:14And so it can make things more costly for them in some ways.
02:19But ultimately, if they're determined to develop these models using some smuggled chips, some stockpiled chips, as well as some lower-end chips,
02:28they're going to be able to do it in relatively fast time.
02:31So ultimately, do you feel that these export controls on chips and AI diffusion are an effective policy and a wise policy moving forward?
02:43I think that they should be one tool in the arsenal that the U.S. and its allies and partners use.
02:49I do think that, as I mentioned, it's important to balance the benefits and the costs.
02:53And when I say benefits, I mean that you're making it more difficult for the PRC.
02:58But it should be one tool.
03:00It's not a panacea.
03:02And I think that there was a view that it was a panacea.
03:05You need to combine different tools, right, like boosting production in U.S. allies and partners.
03:11You need to use R&D to make sure that we run faster and develop better technology than the PRC.
03:17We need to really protect our IP and ensure, you know, there are all kinds of efforts, but we need to be careful about taking them too far.
03:27Simply put, do you think that DeepSeek is a national security risk?
03:31Yes, absolutely.
03:33Particularly because at this point, anyone can still use it.
03:38So it could be a vector for all kinds of things.
03:41It would be very easy to use it to leverage a malicious cyber attack if the PRC wanted to.
03:49And so as well as misinformation and trying to do influence campaigns that change perceptions of the PRC.
03:58And it hasn't been banned in the U.S.
04:00Now, President Trump could ban it under the same law that Congress passed to ban TikTok.
04:05He would just have to determine that DeepSeek is a national security risk.
04:09When I speak to people in a lot of our allies and partners in those governments, it's a very similar situation to Huawei, which is they recognize this as a risk.
04:17They recognize the threat, but they're also worried about retaliation from the PRC.
04:22In the case of businesses, it presents risks of IP theft that they should really take into account once they're installing DeepSeek and using it on their IT systems.
04:33And it could be a vector for obtaining access to their actual operational technology.