Benjamin Dubow
Early last month, reports emerged that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had begun deploying a version of Meta’s Llama model for military purposes. Meta had made the artificial intelligence (AI) model open source, meaning anyone could build a version of their own. Its use for supporting an authoritarian regime – and Meta’s impotent response that such usage violated terms and conditions the U.S. firm could never enforce on the PLA – seemed like yet another parable about how democratic openness could easily turn to authoritarian advantage.
But by the end of the month, the script had flipped. An independent Chinese lab called DeepSeek announced their R1-Lite model achieved a 52.5 percent success rate on advanced mathematics problems. OpenAI’s o1-preview, the hitherto leader, had scored only 44.6 percent. Moreover, DeepSeek was open sourcing its model.
Despite China’s closed internet and media environment, this was hardly unusual. Beijing has thus far taken a more hands-off approach to AI development than would be expected given the stakes. But as AI’s power becomes clearer, that could soon change.
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