In the DeepSeek AI saga, some technologists but not Republicans are relearning the lessons of the previous Chinese tech booms. China’s government not only spends much money on R&D, but the education of its people at world-class universities that is like nothing like what we currently have in the US, and, unlike here in the US where OpenAI is led by a college dropout, DeepSeek is led by an engineer with advanced degrees from a major Chinese technological university. While the techbro Peter Thiel, and his techbro accolytes such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, pay kids not to go to college, a failed program that continues, the Chinese pay kids to earn advanced degrees. And it shows. College dropout Sam Altman, who didn’t create the OpenAI technology (Dr. John Schulman, Ph.D. did and left OpenAI because of Altman), will be copying the DeepSeek technology. Yes, the USA is trying to keep up with China, not the other way around.
Here we go again. Republicans either forgotting, or deliberately ignoring for sake of personal profit, lessons learned from the past. Given the Reagan pathos that dominates current Republican ideology, seemingly out of nowhere to these blind Republicans, a Chinese firm, led by a highly educated Chinese scientist/engineer (from the Caltech of China), made international headlines by besting USA companies at the tech mostly invented at US academic institutions. As we look at DeepSeek, remember that capitalism doesn’t innovate, it monetizes. Remember too that socialism innovates because government funds long-term projects, and isn’t constrained as is capitalism, where the billionaires control the capital. And what do billionaires fund? Stupid stuff. Exploding over-sized rockets that are phallic symbols for their insel-selves, hyperloops, tunnels to nowhere, fake robotaxis, fake solar panels, useless meme coins…………You get the idea. China is a socialist country, and the USA has disdained socialism since the 1980s – the beginning of our downfall.
Moreover, China’s BYD built more electric vehicles in 2024 than Tesla, and their cars are selling throughout the world, except for the USA where high tariffs prevent thier entry. Whether it’s cars, solar panels, space technology, batteries, steel, China does what the USA did before the days of Reagan, they decide on an industry that’s critical, and put a lot of money towards it for a long time, both at the academic level and in R&D for monetization in the marketplace. Yes, Reagan deeducated and deindustrialized the USA, and the USA became a debtor nation under constant economic crisis. The graph below shows how, for example, manufacturing peaked before Reagan and began dropping during his neoliberal-conservative regime. Neoliberalism ensued, and so did deindustrialization.
Ronald Reagan, a shill for the wealthy, began the 40 year decline of the industrialized USA and significantly hurt the educational system in our country. Neoliberalism, a conservatsim-regressive movement, replete with privatization and deregulation, has brought the end of empire. DeepSeek is the latest example.
This week’s current fiasco for the USA was about DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that shocked techies when it released a new open-source artificial intelligence model with a fraction of the funding that US companies have garnered to build their own. DeepSeek’s success led to a US tech stock slide earlier this week, and investors scramble to reexamine their bets. While China’s government is funding academia and private enterprise in China, the US government, led by Trump, is busy instroducing a college dropout to lead our $500 billion Stargate AI project. Skipping school and becoming a billionaire is the Peter Thiel misguiding dream for these morons, such as Sam Altman – the autocratic leader of OpenAI and Stargate. Please understand, the man who created the technology at OpenAI, Dr. John Schulman, Ph.D., a graduate of EECS at Berkeley, left OpenAI for a reason.
Be clear too that DeepSeek is no better than ChatGPT in terms of AI performance. OpenAI is the company, according to a whistleblower, that repeatedly flouted federal copyright laws by siphoning data from across the internet to train its chatbot, ChatGPT. Now that stolen data is available to DeepSeek or anyone else using ChatGPt. But because DeepSeek uses so much less power and can be implemented for much less money, the hype is exacerbated. So the AI hype is still with us, and DeepSeek only adds to the hype. For example, Musk predicted that AI would be “smarter than any human” by the end of 2025. In January 2025, Altman similarly claimed to be “confident we know how to build AGI” and that “in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’”. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, an AI corporation founded by former OpenAI employees, has claimed that AI could double the human lifespan within five to 10 years. These fantasy claims have been shredded by critics such as the American cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, who has even challenged Musk to a $1m bet over his “smarter than any human” claim for AI. Valuations of AI companies are built on hype and that is why guys like Sam Altman fear DeepSeek, which unveiled part of their BS – the part where they need so much investment to perform.
In 2019, college dropout Sam Altman, at a live event for StrictlyVC, the technology journalist Connie Loizos asked Sam Altman how the unusually structured company he ran planned on generating revenue. “OpenAI is so amorphous,” she said. “But it is a business.” Was the aim, she wondered, to license its technology, or customize algorithms for paying clients? “How is it going to work?” Altman replied, “The honest answer is that we have no idea. We have never made any revenue, we have no current plans to make revenue, we have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that ‘once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you.’” The room rippled with laughter, but Altman was serious. “It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it, you can laugh—it’s all right,” he said. “But it is what I actually believe is gonna happen.” Well, obviously, when Sam asked ChatGPT how to make money, it hallucinated.
OpenAI expects to lose roughly $5 billion this year after paying for costs related to running its services and other expenses like employee salaries and office rent, according to an analysis by a financial professional who has also reviewed the documents. Those numbers do not include paying out equity-based compensation to employees, among several large expenses not fully explained in the documents. Enter DeepSeek. If it performs as well as OpenAI at a cost of 95% less, then DeepSeek can expect billions in annual sales with so little cost that a large profit can be attained. But Sam Altman got what he wanted – fame and he’s now a billionaire.
As the USA loses its lead in the technologies created years ago through government funding at our great academic institutions (for example, chips, solar panels, lithium ion bateries), the Chinese are using the playbook of the USA before Reagan’s privatization, deregulation, and deeducation of the USA, and using our old playbook to render the US obsolete. Trump is bringing our decline to a much greater pace as he cuts damn near everything and values poorly educated, bombastic tech bros over highly educated experts in their repsected fields. The end of Empire is upon us.
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