The Playbook for Tomorrow’s Leaders
Health | Innovation | Society
Hey Reader,
🙏🏼 More help is needed for victims of the LA Fires. Consider donating here
🎙 Listen to the Alchemy of Politics Podcast and 🚀 your Leadership Quotient (LQ)
😮 $1.5 trillion was lost in 1 day as Deepseek, a Chinese upstart with a few months and a fraction of the money than their US counterparts, bested OpenAi and other US AI firms such as Anthropic.
As Forbes pointed out, “Nvidia lost $589 billion in market capitalization Monday, which is by far the single greatest one-day value wipeout of any company in history.”
Unprecedented times indeed.
It comes a few days after Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced Project Stargate with Larry Ellison of Oracle. This was a $500 Billion dollar investment on the way to the $1 trillion dollars Altman says is needed to maximize the potential of AI. While Trump took credit for this project, its precursors were actually started under the Biden Administration. Democrats, as usual, have no appreciation of the branding opportunities and if Marc Andreesen is to be believed, were actively trying to squash private sector AI developent.
Deepseek R1 model accomplished this for “only” hundreds of million dollars and is now being called a “Sputnik” moment and prompted the panic selling.
This comes on the heels of the “ban” of TikTok and then its temporary stay by the President.
A few comments
- Of course the Chinese would do it for cheaper and faster. Is anyone surprised by this? Temu anyone?
- It’s worth noting that open AI was never the best AI/LLM model just the most user friendly, which enhanced user adoption. DeepSeek has matched that easily with a similar interface.
- What’s more interesting than the technology developments is the geopolitical implications. Post Cold War, America assumed a liberal capitalistic democracy with an open society was the only model for advanced nations. China has demonstrated that a closed, top down, socialistic country can leverage the internet and compete just as well. Interestingly, Chat GPT is based on a closed source model of technology whereas China’s Deepseek is open source. And given its comparatively minor hardware requirements, downloads have skyrocketed.
- In America, the lines have been been drawn between competing business blocs. OpenAI, Oracle, Softbank versus Anthropic, Google and Amazon. Microsoft has invested heavily into OpenAI but like Apple, is open to working with competitors. As usual, Elon Musk is the wildcard and his AI company Grok is not in the mix (for now), though that didn’t stop him from tweeting about it.
- Azeem Ahar of Exponential View points out that DS emerged from a Chinese hedge fund High Flyer . Unlike in the US, where top graduates go into finance to extract value, in China they are going towards making real innovation. As I have previously argued, we have suffered from the over financialization of our society masquerading as innovation. DeepSeek is innovation. DogeCoin is not.
🌟 Speaking of Project Stargate, it was interesting to see how Altman and Ellison immediately pointed out the health and medicine implications of the investment. This is no accident. For the average voter, AI is still the stuff of movies and few see any real world impact of chatGPT (if they even know about it). To justify a huuuuge amount of money, they needed to stoke AI hype on the final frontier – human health and disease. In a sense, they are “health washing” their business ventures in order to gain social approval.
It’s worth noting that AI’s benefit in clinical medicine is still largely unproven or on the margins. The hope is that it can accelerate “multi-omics” research, which requires massive compute, to give us the era of precision medicine. I pray this era comes to pass, but now is an appropriate time to remind ourselves of the Gardner Hype cycle.
➡️ Reid Hoffman – Th billionaire LinkedIn founder has always been an AI optimist. His new book SuperAgency basically argues that AI will enhance our human creativities and self awareness, which is the hallmark of the transhumanist credo. He categorizes thinking on the topic into 4 categories:
Which one are you?
Frankly this framework itself I disagree with, but I would label myself as a Gloo-Bloo-mer.
He also announced the launch of Manas AI, an AI powered drug discovery startup, in conjunction with physician-scientist-author Siddhartha Mukherjee. If prior attempts at drug discovery were scatter shot affairs born of war, techno boosters promise a more precisely guided future for pharmaceuticals.
💡 What I’m reading
- Return of the Tiger Mom – Yale law professor and controversial parenting guru Amy Chua has returned to fashion as her acolytes Ramaswamy and VP Vance have come to DC (well not Vivek any more). The Free Press article touches on the larger conflicts in our society regarding free speech, “wokeism,” and cultural norms in higher education.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
