AI spread validates power of human progress

DeepSeek has launched a series of innovative, large-model AI products, creating a global sensation. In the intensifying technological containment battle, DeepSeek's rise not only shows the breakthroughs China has made in AI but also reveals a reality: In the era of high-tech competition, administrative measures can no longer block market-driven diffusion of technology. When high-tech development resonates with market demand, administrative interventions cannot stop the spread of advanced technologies.

Strong market demand is the fundamental driving force behind the diffusion of technology. And the diffusion of technology is not a scientific experiment but a complex socioeconomic development process, in which market demand plays the role of "natural selection". Across the world, industries, particularly the finance, healthcare and e-commerce sectors, require efficient data processing and precise analytical capabilities to thrive. Businesses need to leverage AI for effective marketing, personalized services, and even medical diagnoses. This powerful market demand becomes the main force behind the diffusion of AI and AI-related technologies.

As an innovative technology, DeepSeek's performance has been extraordinary. It has great potential in data mining, information retrieval and intelligent analyses. DeepSeek can quickly and accurately process vast amounts of data and significantly enhance value, improving business decision-making, scientific research and social governance. Indeed, the diffusion and acceptance of DeepSeek shows a clear "demand-supply" reinforcement mechanism.

Real-world applications such as shorter drug development cycles, intelligent reorganization of teaching resources, and reducing downtime in manufacturing are creating value and driving the development of new technologies.

The United States-led West thinks imposing sanctions on China will halt its technological progress. But, ironically, the sanctions have prompted China to expedite independent research and development, and build alternative supply chains. In the global AI race triggered by ChatGPT, DeepSeek has chosen a technological path to "encircle cities from the countryside", with its team adopting a "model distillation-heterogeneous computing" approach to train a trillion-parameter model on consumer-grade graphics cards. This "computing guerrilla warfare" significantly reduces training costs.

The biggest irony of regulations on the technology sector is that it hastens the development of the regulated sector. This paradox of "regulation birthing innovation" is common in technology: in the 1990s, the US restricted the export of encryption technology, which accelerated, instead of slowing, the spread of open-source encryption protocols such as PGP. Recent regulations on chips have intensified the "computing guerrilla warfare", with Chinese companies continuously improving large-model parameter efficiency through heterogeneous computing and model compression technologies to achieve better performance with the same computing power.

Administrative intervention is like a dam trying to block floodwaters; in the short term, it may change the direction of the flow, but in the long run, it would help expedite the formation of new channels. This "counter-sanction evolution" is evident in DeepSeek: the model architecture shifted from Transformer to the more resistant Hyena hierarchical structure, training data moved from publicly available corpora to UGC crowd-sourcing, and computing power shifted from centralized procurement to computing node crowd-funding.

Innovation mechanisms are breaking through geographical boundaries and established organizational forms. The diffusion of advanced technologies has evolved into a multi-dimensional, multi-layered ecosystem competition, and any administrative intervention that violates economic principles is unlikely to achieve the intended result.

DeepSeek's open-source community brings together developers from across the world who continuously improve their technologies or creations based on DeepSeek's core principles, facilitating the application and diffusion of technologies in a more flexible manner and on a wider scale. This decentralized grid-type distribution system has strong intervention-resistant capability, making it difficult to control individual nodes influencing the technology's development direction.

Also, the "dark web effect" of talent mobility further weakens administrative control. Top global AI talents have formed an academic community that transcends borders, sharing knowledge through academic conferences, open-source projects and joint research. Intangible knowledge dissemination is a driving force behind the diffusion of technology. This "digital spore" type of diffusion makes national regulations increasingly powerless.

When it comes to diffusion of technologies, market demand has always been a stronger underlying operating system than any administrative force. DeepSeek's rise is essentially the transcendence of technological innovation laws over traditional governance thinking. The core of modern technological governance lies in building channels that facilitate innovation, rather than building dams to block the floodwaters.

Standing at a critical point of society's digital transformation, we ought to rethink the essence of technology diffusion: Not just the spread of code and algorithms, humans also need to break through cognitive boundaries. In this sense, the unstoppable diffusion of technologies validates the irreversibility of human progress.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

The author is secretary of the Party Committee and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development.