This week has seen an escalation of the one-upmanship that has defined the AI era as news of a new Chinese player hit global headlines.
On Monday, US tech giant Nvidia lost over a sixth of its value following the launch of Chinese chatbot, DeepSeek.
Firms connected to Nvidia, including Microsoft and Google, also saw stocks tumble.
DeepSeek was reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI and is already most downloaded free app in the US following its launch last week.
US restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips to China have forced Chinese developers to share their work with each other and experiment with new methods, resulting in AI models that require much less computing power.
President Trump described the moment as “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry, but added that it could be a positive for the US.
He said: “If you could do it cheaper, if you could do it [for] less [and] get to the same end result.
“I think that’s a good thing for us.”
While stocks had stedied by Tuesday, the development had shaken US giants such as Meta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly assembling four ‘war rooms’ of engineers to understand how DeepSeek had advanced so quickly.
Reports suggested that DeepSeek’s flagship model potentially outperforms the next version of Meta’s Llama AI, set to ship early this year.
On Wednesday, OpenAI said that it was ‘reviewing’ allegations that DeepSeek used its AI models to create the rival chatbot.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said: “We know that groups in [China] are actively working to use methods, including what’s known as distillation, to try to replicate advanced US AI models.
“We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more.
“We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here.”
OpenAI has itself been subject to multiple lawsuits for accessing content it didn’t have the rights to in order to build ChatGPT.
With US anxiety over DeepSeek pushing its rivals to step up operations, news of another potential Chinese rival began to surface.
Tech company Alibaba released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model that it claimed surpassed DeepSeek-V3.
The company’s cloud division published an announcement on its official WeChat account.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B.”
The development shows that the AI arms race is not just an international one but a domestic one too, suggesting further threat to US dominance as Chinese companies compete with one another with fewer regulations.
While news of the rapid advancement of AI made global headlines, a new report suggested that the UK’s health system is largey sceptical of the emerging technology.
The pan-European report from Corti and YouGov found that the UK is falling behind the rest of Europe in adopting healthcare AI, despite the potential positive impacts on persistent heavy workloads.
A key issue for the healthcare sector is the mistrust of general-purpose AI tools flooding the market, the report revealed.
The report found that the vast majority of healthcare professionals in the UK are not using AI at work, with 73 per cent reporting that they have never done so – a higher rate than any other nation in the study.
This is despite these tools being designed to alleviate some of the biggest issues plaguing the sector – high workloads, burdensome admin and persistent NHS staff shortages.
Andreas Cleve, co-founder and CEO of Corti, said: “AI is key to the future success of healthcare. In a few short years, we’ve witnessed exciting progress.
“However, the vast majority of tools available today rely on general-purpose AI that isn’t built to integrate or adapt to the complexities of healthcare.
“As a result, these tools often fail to deliver, overpromising and struggling to scale beyond trials due to challenges with accuracy, cost, and integration.
“Is it any wonder clinicians feel they can’t trust AI when the tools they’re given aren’t designed with their needs in mind?
“Healthcare needs solutions that meet the intricate demands of real-world care environments, built on a new infrastructure the healthcare sector can trust to succeed.”
