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Whatever your opinion is on artificial intelligence, there\u2019s a good chance that you\u2019ve heard of the recent release of Deepseek AI. The system, released by<\/a> Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, recently made waves in the tech industry as a cheaper and more efficient large language model than many competing models, including OpenAI. LLMs operate by analyzing massive amounts of data and using it to predict sentence structures, usually based on topical prompts. For a while, AI development was comfortably a U.S.-dominated business with companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta being the top names in the field. Maybe it was the United States\u2019 comfort in being number one that made it so shocking<\/a> for a Chinese company to find success.<\/p>\n Developed amid a trade war<\/a> between the U.S. and China, Deepseek had limited access to Nvidia computer chips<\/a>. Partially because of this, Deepseek\u2019s cost of development was much lower than its U.S. competitors, at $6 million contrasting the several billion<\/a> paid by U.S. companies. Compared to OpenAI, it is also more effective at solving complex problems<\/a>. Additionally, the software is open-weight. This means that while the training data itself is not public like an open source software would be, Deepseek allows free access to the parameters, or \u201cweights,\u201d it uses to function. This is a huge step for accessibility of AI research in particular, as many top AI systems are privatized.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite this being a huge in innovation in LLMs, you wouldn\u2019t know it based on the media coverage from here in the U.S. In fact, it took me digging through several pages of fearmongering to find any substantial information on how Deepseek works to write this article. If you Google \u201cDeepseek\u201d and look through the news category, you\u2019ll see pages<\/a> upon pages<\/a> of coverage on \u201cconcerns over security, censorship and dependence on China\u201d and \u201cDeepSeek \u2013 A Wake-Up Call For US Higher Education\u201d \u2014 lines clearly written out of reigniting Cold War-esque posturing, or at least hoping to farm some clicks off the sentiment. An article<\/a> by WIRED titled \u201cChinese Companies Rush to Put DeepSeek in Everything\u201d features an eye-catching tagline on stock prices and nationalism, making it out to be anything but normal behavior, as if the U.S. doesn\u2019t use our own AI for the exact same things.<\/p>\n Look, I get it. First, it was nuclear arms, then space, then the moon \u2014 now it\u2019s AI. Beyond claims of national safety, legitimate or otherwise, technology and innovation have always been a point of pride and show of power on the international stage<\/a>. We want to win, and with the amount of money<\/a> and effort the U.S. is funneling into artificial intelligence, it\u2019s frustrating for many to still not be consistently on top. It\u2019s comical, though, to pretend that we\u2019re somehow the only ones allowed to see success in technology. After all, China has one of the biggest economies in the world, a huge population with many experienced and intelligent developers and it is not currently being hostile<\/a> to citizens pursuing careers in STEM. To put it bluntly, the way that Deepseek is discussed within tech news and many parts of the tech community is propaganda \u2014\u00a0fearmongering at best and flat-out xenophobia at worst. Very common technology features, like text prediction<\/a>, are now being featured as some Chinese data-harvesting conspiracy just because it\u2019s being done outside the Western world.\u00a0<\/p>\n