LeHane: The North Star of Deep Seek: What will you tell me about the U.S. – China relationship?
LeHane: Maybe a way to think about it is: I go to the library, borrow a book, I can read that book and return the book. I have certain information. If you go to the library and take the book, never return the book, put the book out under your name, that is two other ways of thinking about this. But I think that the big point – the North Star that I would just really emphasize – is that there is a real competition between the U.S. and China. The stakes of the competition are enormous.
I would like to know the difference between Deep Seek accessing your data and you training your own products for use by others without their permission.
Stargate, DeepSeek, and OpenAI: AI Infrastructure for the U.S. National Labs, Innovation for Security, Energy and Nuclear Security
LeHane: Stargate is an infrastructure. At the end of the day, the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are in a race, a competition to see who ultimately leads in AI. Right now, the U.S. has a lead. It’s not a huge lead, but we do have a lead. The stakes could not be bigger: Are we going to build the world on democratic, free AI, or is it going to be authoritarian, autocratic AI? And what will decide that is something called compute. And compute is, if you add up the following pieces: chips, data, talent and energy. If you put that all together, that is a representation of 21st century AI infrastructure. This $500 billion investment in U.S. Artificial Intelligence infrastructure was announced by President Trump with the help of our partners at SoftBank and Oracle.
And now OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and a big part of Stargate — has announced it’s partnering with the U.S. National Laboratories to supply the government with advanced models for things like cybersecurity, energy infrastructure and nuclear security.
Mary Louise Kelly: Start with this new partnership with the National Labs. Why is this a big deal in a few sentences? What is the time frame for it to produce fruit?
LeHane: The main point for us is that the U.S. has to have the infrastructure to maintain its lead. When you talk about $500 billion, it’s not US taxpayer money. This is private sector money, because there’s an understanding that as AI continues to move forward, there’s going to be more and more of a demand for the AI, which then requires more and more compute.
Kelly thinks that it needs to be expensive. $500 billion is a lot of money, and DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, has prompted a conversation about whether foreign rivals are doing things a lot cheaper than American companies.
DeepSeek, for those unaware, is a lot like ChatGPT — there’s a website and a mobile app, and you can type into a little text box and have it talk back to you. The way it was built is what makes it special. On January 20th, the startup’s most recent major release, a reasoning model called R1, dropped just weeks after the company’s last model V3, both of which began showing some very impressive AI benchmark performance. It became clear that DeepSeek models perform like competing ones from Openai, Meta, and the like. They are totally free to use.
LeHane: We’re in the process of reviewing what may or may not have occurred. There is something that happens in the AI world called distillation. Distilling is a very complex idea. But effectively, can people send a lot of stuff at your models and be able to take information out of it, and then use that information to replicate something else?
DeepSeek, Stargate and the AI Arms Race: Where the AI Industry is headed next? The Verge Senior Editor’s Podcast Kylie Robison
There was a huge selloff of tech stocks earlier this week. Nvidia’s stock price plunged 17 percent on Monday and set a new stock market decline record.
Tech executives have been telling us for more than 2 years that the path to full potential of Artificial Intelligence was to throw GPUs at the problem. Since that time, scale has been in charge. At the White House two weeks ago, Sam Altman made a big announcement concerning a $500 billion data center venture called Stargate that he said would improve OpenAI’s abilities to build and deploy new models.
What is clear is that we’ve entered a new phase in the AI arms race, and DeepSeek and Stargate represent more than just two distinct paths toward superintelligence: they also represent a new, escalating front in the US-China relationship and the geopolitics of AI. President Donald Trump iswreaking havoc on the foreign relations with a new threat of tariffs on foreign chips.
There is a whole lot going on here — and the news cycle is moving very fast. So to break it all down, I invited Verge senior AI reporter Kylie Robison on the show to discuss all the events of the past couple weeks and to figure out where the AI industry is headed next.
