AI race between China and USA is a new geo-tech conflict

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence large language model, has taken the US by surprise by quickly challenging dominant players such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s LLama. Experts believe that this can also be a wake-up call for Europe’s AI innovators.

DeepSeek, a China-based company, was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an information and electronics engineer, and is the first of such advanced AI systems which is available to users for free.

It comes after the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which was first launched in 2022. French start-up Mistal AI is the only real competitor to the US and Chinese giants. In 2024, it announced a new large language model set to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, the company previously complained that Europe lacks the data centres to train artificial intelligence models that match the current demand. The rise of DeepSeek is an opportunity for LLM developers in Europe and around the world to challenge themselves to find ways to be more innovative “without being the 'biggest' one”.

It shows that the US model of always throwing more money and data at it is not the only way. And it is also a reminder that regulation – such as a restriction on the export of chips – does not need to stand in the way of innovation.

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, EU policy lead at Franco-American AI company Hugging Face – which provides access to a code library for evaluating machine learning models and data sets — echoed these statements.

“By focusing on responsible, high-quality AI rather than pure scale, European developers have a unique opportunity to play to their strengths: advancing AI that is efficient, trustworthy, and tailored to diverse applications,” she said.

Henna Virkkunen, European Commissioner-designate for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, pledged to make Europe the 'AI continent', but the bloc trails behind other regions in the world when it comes to investment in AI.

A EU court in 2024 warned that Europe has so far had little success in developing its own artificial intelligence ecosystem, and has failed to accelerate investment on a par with global leaders.

The AI investment gap between the US and the EU more than doubled between 2018 and 2020, with the EU trailing by more than €10 billion and US President Donald Trump just announced billions of dollars in AI investments.

Claes de Vreese, University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society at the University of Amsterdam, told Euronews that with the rise of a Chinese LLM player, Europe is now caught in the middle of the US and Chinese developments.

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