By Atanu Biswas
Even though America signed the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, they continued to feel uneasy about it. Ten years on, Paris just hosted an important summit on artificial intelligence (AI). And at this historic AI Action Summit in Paris, the US and the UK didn’t sign the declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” AI.
In fact, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Europe will reduce regulations to facilitate the growth of AI in the continent. However, “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry”, US Vice President JD Vance warned against the European Union’s (EU) regulatory approach. In particular, he urged Europeans to view the new AI frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.
America’s recent uneasiness regarding AI might have been driven by China’s DeepSeek, which is currently dominating the AI landscape. DeepSeek appeared about two weeks before the summit and overshadowed it as well. In fact, the discussions and reactions from different parties — the summit as a whole — might have been entirely different in the absence of DeepSeek. Even while ideas like “AI sovereignty” have been around for a while, everyone, even American leaders, understood in the years before DeepSeek that the rest of the world would have to rely on the monopolistic American Big Tech industry.
Then came DeepSeek. One of America’s main concerns was that it implied China had surpassed American know-how in AI. Moreover, we all knew, wrongly though, that hefty investments are necessary for AI innovation. In the process, Big Tech aspires to get bigger. One of Donald Trump’s first few announcements in his second term was that OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank have together pledged a $500-billion investment to create AI infrastructure under a joint venture called “Stargate”. However, now that China has stormed into AI innovation with DeepSeek, its low-tech, low-cost alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, other countries dared to leap forward.
And although DeepSeek may not be a standalone tech marvel, its influence on AI economics, thus, may be more significant. However, DeepSeek’s biggest effect on civilisation may be that Silicon Valley became concerned that China’s chatbot was democratising AI! AI democratisation is the more equitable spread of AI applications and capabilities across society, framed on at least three core aspects — democratising AI use, AI development, and AI governance. The implication of democratised AI use is that more people will benefit from AI capabilities, both in their personal and working lives. While the comparable version of ChatGPT costs about $200 per month, DeepSeek is free. Crucially, its code is also open-source, whereas many experts think that several OpenAI models are basically black boxes.
Significantly, DeepSeek’s debut could mark a seismic change by challenging the dominance of proprietary systems and lowering entry hurdles for start-ups worldwide. At a substantially smaller investment than was previously believed to be required, other players would inevitably enter the market. This ensures wider engagement in tech breakthroughs — in line with the growing demand for inclusive AI development and neutral governance.
Would it put an end to US Big Tech’s almost monopolistic imperialism? DeepSeek is unquestionably aiding in democratising AI if it’s increasing AI’s efficiency, affordability, and accessibility by removing obstacles related to cost, complexity, or processing power. This is a big step towards levelling the playing field in the AI industry.
Soon, many more nations in Europe, Asia, or Australia may develop their own technology that would enable them to become indigenously AI-empowered at a low cost without having to pay exorbitant fees to the US tech giants. What’s more, if some less developed countries fail to achieve their own DeepSeek moment, they will also have plenty of options to purchase the necessary AI services from an emerging globally competitive market, which will significantly cut the price.
Overall, DeepSeek’s message to the Western tech community is that cooperation, not rivalry, is the way of the future for AI. DeepSeek has influenced the direction of global innovation by questioning conventions through destabilising US monopoly. Paradoxically, thus, a nation devoid of democracy may have democratised AI. In his 2021 book Democratizing Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Everyone, Jacques Ludik also proposed a Massive Transformative Purpose for Humanity and associated goals that complement the United Nations’ 2030 vision and sustainable development goals to help shape a beneficial human-centric future in a decentralised hyperconnected world.
In the just-concluded AI Action Summit in Paris, governments have actually strengthened their sovereignty-first AI strategy in response to DeepSeek’s threat, something which America might not particularly like. In the summit, representatives of different countries have publicly backed their AI “national champions” and prioritised plans to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology in order to protect themselves from becoming dependent on other nations. “Sovereign AI”, thus, refers to the fact that nations have already been investing billions in their own supercomputers and proprietary models in an effort to gain control over vital technology like AI. One country’s control over its own AI stack was referred to as AI sovereignty. The concept has been reignited in the post-DeepSeek era, although the required investment seems lower.
Thus, DeepSeek succeeded in spreading the message about AI democracy and sovereignty globally. A recent article in The Economist headlined “After DeepSeek, America and the EU are getting AI wrong” suggests that while America should ease up, Europe has a chance to catch up.
There’s little doubt that if ChatGPT is a change point in the history of civilisation, so is DeepSeek. But while ChatGPT drew the world more into Big Tech’s domain, DeepSeek may just have broken the barrier, at least in the global perspective — and mindset — at a time when nationalism is on the rise everywhere. The AI summit was also overtaken by this openness.
The writer is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
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