Chen Bai/WrittenA company that started as a private equity firm in the A-share market has now become a “top player” in the global AI field. Even Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, has had to start paying attention to this company, which is referred to in Silicon Valley as the “mysterious force from the East.”
This company is DeepSeek. In just a week, it has made headlines in the global AI community. Public information shows that DeepSeek is a subsidiary of the domestic quantitative giant, Huanfang Quantitative. Its latest large model, DeepSeek-V3, can match the performance of the world’s top closed-source models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, but its cost is only 1/10 of the industry mainstream models. This company has significantly reduced the massive computing power required by previous large models, directly lowering the cost of these models, and it is even dubbed the “Pinduoduo of AI.”
No one expected that new possibilities for AI would emerge from a Chinese quantitative investment institution. Even though DeepSeek-V3 is currently experiencing various “hallucinations”—such as believing it is ChatGPT when answering—no one can deny that it has indeed succeeded in maintaining the same performance while drastically reducing costs.
Due to reasons like chip import restrictions, the situation for China’s high-tech industry is quite tough in 2024. On one hand, there is a booming wave of artificial intelligence sweeping the globe, while on the other, there is a restriction on high-end chip supply due to great power competition. However, even under such adverse external conditions filled with uncertainty, China’s entrepreneurial tech companies have still achieved many remarkable outcomes.
In addition to DeepSeek, another Chinese robotics company, Yushu Technology, has recently gained global popularity. Its robotic dog is regarded as having accomplished unimaginable operations overseas. In the software market, the game “Black Myth: Wukong,” which shocked the gaming industry in the first half of the year, received multiple nominations at the global annual game awards TGA and ultimately won two awards for “Best Action Game” and “Player’s Voice”… The emergence of these companies and products once again proves that even when Chinese enterprises are on the edge of a cliff, they possess strong resilience and an innovative explosive power for survival.
The pressure from the external environment can indeed provide the impetus for progress, which is one of the direct reasons prompting companies to innovate and break through. However, being proud of their achievements should not be the endpoint of our thinking about innovation; we cannot merely rely on the pressure of the environment to force innovation.
As we approach 2025, we must think about how to provide more sunlight and rain to those companies dedicated to innovation, allowing flowers blooming on the cliffs to have more room for growth.
From DeepSeek to Yushu Technology to Game Science, if we summarize the characteristics of this batch of companies, we will find that those that truly have an impact on the global technology market all share one commonality: they emerge from sufficient competition in the market. These startups may not have known from the beginning what they could achieve; their innovations are formed through exploration in the market, not pre-planned—who would have thought that a quantitative investment company could incubate the highest cost-performance AI?
Looking back at the history of China’s internet industry over the past 20 years, we find that the growth history of almost all first-tier internet technology companies shares the same underlying logic as that of DeepSeek today: benefiting from the dividends of the new technological revolution and creating the most user-friendly products in a fully competitive market.
When innovation becomes the only way to lead high-quality economic development, what is most important now may be to follow the objective laws of innovation itself. In 2023, former OpenAI scientist Kenneth Stanley and others published “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned,” in which the authors repeatedly emphasize the unpredictability of innovation, describing it as the “victory of the aimless.”
Despite the various issues we face today, when a new round of technological revolution has gradually opened the door to a new growth cycle, what we need to do is to embrace new technologies better and provide ample space for innovation to occur.
Innovation has always been a process that emerges from the subtle changes of competition. In this “small matter” of innovation, it is better to leave it entirely to the market and entrepreneurs to accomplish.
(The author is a senior media person)