New charges in an alleged artificial intelligence trade secret theft by a Chinese national is a warning about how Chinese economic espionage unfairly tips the scales in the battle for technological dominance.
The new Chinese AI platform DeepSeek shook Silicon Valley last month when it claimed engineers had developed artificial intelligence capabilities comparable to U.S. firms at lower cost and with less advanced chips.
Corporate espionage is always around us. Who here honestly believes the government of every country isn't doing the exact same thing to its competitors of which it accuses them?
ReplyDeleteAnd just wait until we find out that "DeepSeek" really didn't beat everyone else on the cheap, the ChiCom government probably processed the data (which costs tens of millions of dollars per run) behind the scenes and fed it over to this supposed "independent" organization. Tests published in the Wall Street Journal said it won't answer anything related to the Tiananmen Square massacre either. But hey! You can surely trust it on anything else.
ReplyDeleteAI theory and practice is public domain. The DeepSeek researchers published scholarly papers showing their techniques. All the software and code came from public domain sources.
ReplyDeleteThere are many free and "open source" AI tools available from Meta, Google, and now China. Ironically, the AI from China is the *least* censored compared to Western AI. Just don't ask it anything about Tienanmen Square. Or tanks.
However, to "train" the hundreds of AI model "experts" DeepSeek can run on a home PC, they likely used NVidia A100s or similar high-end AI server rack hardware. These cards cannot be sold to China and it's likely they got them on the black market.
So there's kind of an espionage story here, but not much.