Mick Ryan
The past 24 hours have seen technology and business publications reporting on the release of the DeepSeek-R1 chatbot in the United States. The developers of the latest version of the DeepSeek AI model have claimed that it operates on par with OpenAI-o1, that it is fully open-source and that it cost just $6 million to develop. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described it as “an impressive model”.
Understandably, investors in the United States have questioned the billions of dollars they have been pouring into American developers. Chip maker Nvidia lost $588 billion in value in a single day, which is slightly more than the GDP of Norway. Besides the reassessment of tech investment in America, and the losses suffered by tech companies, there may be a range of technological, commercial and political implications of the new DeepSeek-R1 model. As one commentator has noted, “it upends the way that investors have thought about how AI needed to be developed and implemented.”
I intend to explore in this article the potential military implications of this DeepSeek-R1 development. I should emphasise that I write this as an expert in military affairs, and someone who has written about the impact of new technologies on military organisations, not as someone who is an AI or software expert. Despite that, I think there are sufficient implications that we can identify now – and many questions that should be asked.
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