Western Hubris & China’s Copycat DeepSeek - What it means for you.

It surprised everybody. Well anyone who’d not read or weren’t privy to the culture of Chinese tech firms.

If the following are familiar to you: Weibo (微博) Taobao (淘宝), Baidu(百度), Wēixìn (微信) then you were likely one of the unfazed at DeepSeek’s public debut.

They are Chinese equivalents of Twitter, eBay, Facebook, Google news, and for Wēixìn (微信) WeChat, there is no popular US equivalent. WeChat referred to as a super app — a Swiss knife that can do anything from payments, group chats to text, voice and video calls — is what Musk desires.

China has long been held up by American and British firms mockingly as copycats. This time is Open AI’s Sam Altman accusing DeepSeek of appropriating its code to build DeepSeek. A number of experts appearing on CNBC, such as early-stage venture investor, Benchmark partner Chetan Puttagunta are unclear. He says speaking to Deidre Bossa, adding they likely mixed up AI models and it looks like they had good data.

Given the long history of Chinese Tech, and accusations of copying, this is unlikely to faze its owners. However, the implications across Silicon Valley are more pressing. DeepSeek’s claim it was made for a fraction of Chat GPT’s costs at $5.6M, compared to Open AI’s yearly running cost of $5B spooked the markets with a $600bn fall in AI-tech stocks values.

So what does this mean for Silicon Valley, Western Tech hubs, or the public?

China Tech

I’ve worked in tech reaching three decades, and was part of the Dotcom boom in the UK, becoming Editor for a stint at Justgiving.com when it first launched. Since then, I’ve been teaching startups, and storytelling to large cohorts of international Chinese students.

Some years back as part of a British University delegation I was in China sharing knowledge and made films on their tech industry, so I’ve come across China’s tech first hand.

Copycatting may seem repugnant but largely that’s how the tech works. My own platform (www.viewmagazine.tv) which won an international award in 2005 was used by the creative director of AlJazeera.com for their launch site. We share a mutual friend Riz Khan and he told personally. It was sent out to agency to influence their direction. I’m not suggesting my site and its coding was used in the end.

In the creative industry, words such as “influence” “Inspirer” are more widely used. That is how an idea leads a creative to produce his or her own work and iterate on it. Art historian E H Gombrich called this “Schema plus correction”. American art critic Harold Bloom’s in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) pointed out how poets are triggered using works of previous artists, because it create a sense of anxiety that their own work will be seen as unoriginal.

Copycatting is different to influence. It has an unwritten code. It’s a quid pro quo. One day you copy me; next day I copy you. US and Western firms may feel slighted they’ve not benefited from this relationship largely because China’s Twitter, eBay, Facebook, Google news are derivatives of theirs, so what’s to copy? And operating within China shields their companies from Western scrutiny.

Wēixìn (微信) WeChat is the super app every UA tech giant would like to get hold of its source code.

But there’s another point that’s woefully missed, which a former executive, at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, now a major AI entrepreneur provides in his book AI Super-Powers:

Kai Fu Lee Lee writes

“Pure copycats never made for great companies and they can survive inside this Coliseum. But the trial-by-fire, competitive landscape created when one is surrounded by ruthless copycats had the result of forging a generation of the most tenacious entrepreneurs on Earth. As we enter the age of AI implementation, this cut throat entrepreneurial environment will be one of China’s core assets in building and machine-learning, driven economy.”

Lee’s book, released in 2018, describes how Chinese tech’s money-driven culture thrives compared to Silicon Valley’s mission-driven ethos. China may have suffered from a scarcity of computing power and AI talent but data was not their Achilles heel. Empowered by government, particularly after 2013, China made a point that it wants to lead the world by 2030.

Lee adds.

Corporate America is unprepared for this global wave of Chinese entrepreneurship, because it fundamentally misunderstood the secrets to The Cloner’s success. Wang Xing didn’t succeed because he’s being a copycat. He triumphed because he’d become a gladiator.

Wang Xing was behind Xiaonei (China’s Facebook). He sold it off because he couldn’t raise funds for its costs, but later developed Meituan — an e-comerce site modelled on Groupon. Its market cap today is $114.67 Billion. Groupon which hit Groupon’s market cap is approximately $2.58 Billion is today around $423.53 Million.

Now this isn’t to suggest I’m in favour of copycatting before you hit the comments, and neither am I saying DeepSeek is better, or should be used in favour of ChatGPT. Each to their own. This is a post equally about hegemony, complacency, arrogance even, and what’s in it for the public.

In one of my most memorable lectures, I let my international Masters students talk about bias, while teaching International news reporting. On one occasion, a student who often sat meekly in the centre row, put her hand up to make a point. I could tell she’d made a huge effort. What she then went on to say quietened the room. You could hear people breathing, it was that quiet.

Her speech went like this.

You know very little about us. But we know so much about you. You choose not to know, and are fed stories that you take on and you see the worse in people and us Chinese. We are not like what you think, and we do not all carry the views of our elite, but like you we are patriotic, and have values that are human.

This view of misunderstanding China was stated by the eminent Professor Hugo de Burgh who is an authority on China. Take a listen. We know little outside what legacy media focus on in China and hence decision-makers can be poorer for that.

Today, R&D World reports

China may be winning the AI patent race in terms of sheer volume, with almost 13,000 granted patents, but the U.S. (8,609 patents) dominates in terms of impact.

Whose impact and how is that measured? China’s strategy too is all about volume and its competitiveness. Bottom line? AI competition is good for industry, but what about consumers? This week DeepSeek became the number one app on Apple downloads, but there’s another side to this.

Baroness Kidron in the UK’s second parliamentary chamber, The House of Lords, summed it up, as the chamber considered amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill.

In its present state, the Bill gives AIs unfettered access to the work of creatives in the UK with no consequences to copyright infringement and compensation.

Baroness Kidron urged her colleagues to vote against the government, citing the damage it would do to creatives’ livelihoods. She cited DeepSeek and how it, at the affordable cost of $5M to develop, could facilitate more companies to develop AI models. It’s worth your watch.