Indian Strategic Studies: 02/06/25

6 February 2025

Fighting In Myanmar’s Sagaing Region Prompts Thousands To Flee To India Border

Intense fighting between Myanmar’s military and rebel forces in Sagaing region near the country’s border with India has forced more than 3,000 civilians to flee their homes and led to heavy casualties on both sides, according to sources.

The fiercest fighting in Tamu township began on Monday, as rebel fighters launched an offensive targeting temporary military camps in the area, prompting the military to reinforce its troops with airstrikes and drone bombs, residents, aid workers and anti-junta groups said.

Tamu is in Sagaing, a heartland region populated largely by members of the majority Burman community that has been torn by violence since democracy activists set up paramilitary groups to battle the military after the 2021 coup.

Since early January, more than 3,000 residents of Tamu township have fled some 24 kilometers (15 miles) to the border separating Sagaing region and India’s Manipur state, said aid workers.

Fighting continued on Thursday at a military camp between Tamu’s Htan Ta Pin and Pan Thar villages, an official from the anti-junta Tamu Township People’s Defense Force, or PDF, told RFA Burmese.

The PDF official called the military camp “significant,” noting that around 400 pro-junta fighters are stationed there, including from the Pyu Saw Htee militia.

China’s long view on quantum tech has the US and EU playing catch-up

Antonia Hmaidi & Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau

Introduction: China has entered the global competition over quantum technology leadership

Quantum technologies are seen around the world as pathbreaking technology, as quantum computing can do calculations not currently possible with digital computers, and quantum communication can ensure secure communication over long distances (see table 1). While quantum technologies are still in the research phase, any country that is able to deploy quantum tech first will have a first mover advantage. This early stage also means that front runners and technical approaches have not yet been consolidated.

However, researchers are making continuous breakthroughs. For instance, in October 2024, Chinese researchers used a quantum computer developed by the Canadian company D-Wave to break key components of advanced encryption standards, an encryption system used by the military and considered state-of-the-art.1 As working encryption is the basis for most communication today, including the internet, being able to break encryption at scale would be a game-changer.

The US and China have both elevated quantum technology to an arena of global technology competition similar to the Cold War rivalry over nuclear capabilities. Although the product is not a bomb but a computer, whoever develops quantum computing first will have palpable military advantages in cryptology, detection and information processing, not to mention a symbolic victory in a tech field all global powers agree is of strategic significance.2

No, DeepSeek isn’t America’s AI Sputnik moment

Sebastien Laye

In the annals of history, moments of profound technological disruption often serve as wake-up calls for entire nations. The release of DeepSeek’s innovative and efficient artificial intelligence model has been heralded as such a turning point — a “Sputnik moment” for the U.S.

Just as the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the satellite Sputnik catalyzed the Apollo Program and ultimately affirmed U.S. technological leadership, DeepSeek’s emergence has sent shockwaves through the global AI industry and policy circles, demanding a swift and strategic American response.

At first glance, the parallels to the Cold War’s Space Race are striking.

Sputnik shattered the illusion of U.S. technological supremacy and galvanized a national effort to invest in education, research, and innovation. Today, DeepSeek’s disruptive model has undermined some assumptions about the AI landscape, exposing vulnerabilities in the U.S. strategy while highlighting the intensity of global competition.

Commentators (chiefly liberals or anti-Trump of all stripes) are quick to berate Silicon Valley or scold Stargate, the bold, $500 billion public-private AI infrastructure project. The stakes should call for national unity: Leadership in the intelligence age will shape the future of economic growth, geopolitical influence and societal transformation.

Coming Together or Falling Apart Over China?

Daniel S. Hamilton

The transatlantic partners are closer in their assessments of the China Challenge today than they were four years ago. When Donald Trump attended his first NATO summit, China was nothing more than an afterthought. NATO leaders now agree that Beijing challenges “our interests, security and values” and “present[s] systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.”

Yet transatlantic efforts to meet the China Challenge have proven ineffective. Neither party is prepared to match the money Beijing is throwing behind its own agenda. Neither has been willing or able to harness the full combined potential of their deeply integrated $8.7 trillion economy to ensure they remain global rule-makers rather than become rule-takers.

The transatlantic partners approach Beijing from different strategic positions, with different tools, and with different senses of urgency. Priorities are often mismatched. European countries remain wedded to global trade rules. US Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned that China has abused those rules and wants to weaken them.

The two sides have found it difficult to align their export controls and investment screening efforts. And while the United States has reduced its dependence on imports of Chinese manufactured goods over the past five years, the European Union (EU) has become more reliant on China. Key industrial sectors in countries like Germany, Spain, and Hungary are doubling down on China.

U.S. urged to wage political warfare in China to counter Beijing’s influence activities

Bill Gertz

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

China is subverting the United States through multibillion-dollar influence campaigns and U.S. political warfare operations inside China are needed to counter the activities, a panel of experts told Congress on Thursday.

Four specialists in Chinese influence and intelligence activities told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the operations range from recruiting university professors and corrupting American officials to cyber and internet influence operations, technology theft and coercive political activities.

The Senate hearing was one of the first of its kind by Congress to examine in detail the activities of Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a Chinese Communist Party organization engaged in aggressive political influence operations targeting a wide range of American institutions.

The Rise of DeepSeek: What the Headlines Miss

Lennart Heim

Recent coverage of DeepSeek's AI models has focused heavily on their impressive benchmark performance and efficiency gains. While these achievements deserve recognition and carry policy implications (more below), the story of compute access, export controls, and AI development is more complex than many reports suggest. Here are some key points that deserve more attention:

Real export restrictions on AI chips only started in October 2023, making claims about their ineffectiveness premature. DeepSeek trained on Nvidia H800s, chips designed specifically to circumvent the original October 2022 controls. For DeepSeek's workloads, these chips perform similarly to the H100s available in the United States. The now available H20, Nvidia's most recent AI chip which can be exported to China, is less performant for training (though it still offers significant deployment capabilities that should be addressed[1]).

Export controls will affect China's AI ecosystem through reduced deployment capabilities, limited company growth, and constraints on synthetic training and self-play capabilities.

2. Export controls on hardware operate with a time lag and haven't had time to bite yet.[2] China is still running pre-restriction data centers with tens of thousands of chips, while U.S. companies are constructing data centers with hundreds of thousands. The real test comes when these data centers need upgrading or expansion—a process that will be easier for U.S. firms but challenging for Chinese companies under U.S. export controls. If next-generation models require 100,000 chips for training, export controls will significantly impact Chinese frontier model development. However, even without such scaling, the controls will affect China's AI ecosystem through reduced deployment capabilities, limited company growth, and constraints on synthetic training and self-play capabilities.

Group 'linked to DeepSeek' DID steal OpenAI data, Microsoft fears, as concerns grow that the communist tech has ripped off US intellectual property

ELENA SALVONI

Tech giants Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly investigating whether data output from the ChatGPT maker's technology was secretly taken by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek.

Microsoft's security researchers observed individuals they believed to be connected to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI's application programming interface (API), according to a report by Bloomberg News.

OpenAI's API is the main way that software developers and business customers access its services, buying a licence in order to integrate its models into their own applications.

US firm Microsoft, the largest investor for OpenAI, notified the company of suspicious activity in the autumn, according to the Bloomberg report.

Low-cost Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, an alternative to US rivals, sparked a tech stock selloff on Monday as its free AI assistant overtook OpenAI's ChatGPT on Apple's App Store in the US.

DeepSeek's meteoric rise has raised questions about how a start-up could have become a market leader so rapidly, apparently side-stepping a US ban on Chinese firms using the most advanced microchips available to domestic tech companies.

The Right Way to Engage With Syria’s New Rulers

Nafees Hamid, Nils Mallock, Broderick McDonald, and Rahaf Aldoughli

In December 2024, a handful of rebel groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ousted the brutal dictatorship that had ruled Syria for five decades and set up an interim administration. Now, foreign countries are trying to steer Syria’s new de facto leaders toward an inclusive government free of sectarian reprisals and away from extreme forms of Islamism. The head of HTS and the president of Syria’s transitional government, Ahmed al-Shara, who previously went by the name Abu Mohmmad al-Julani, has publicly endorsed this vision. But many observers remain skeptical of his promises to share power because HTS began as

Global Hyper Shift: The Left Agenda’s Responsibility for the Rise of Authoritarian Tyrannies – OpEd

Paul Tolmachev

Democracies and authoritarian regimes have entered the stage of a new paradigm of coexistence, changing the world order before our eyes.

The authoritarian regimes, having fallen into the middle income trap and having reached the ceiling of their economic capabilities (as a production industrial base for developed economies) faced a natural and obvious fork in the road of changing the social contract and choosing the subsequent trajectory of existence.

Either – political democratization and institutional liberalization with further development and transition to a post-industrial economic modus.

Either – economic conservatism, political tightening, institutional regression, increased ideological propaganda and social manipulation by incumbent power groups to preserve and prolong their life cycle.

Democratic countries, in turn, have experienced an exceptional leftward bias, expressed in the growth of paternalism and the expansion of the state as an active actor rather than an arbitrator. It should be remembered that any state expansion is an increase in the influence and powers of political entrepreneurs and managers, i.e. top politicians and bureaucratic bureaucracy.

BORDER IMPERIALISM IN THE MAGHREB

Corinna Mullin

Introduction

This report explores the structural dynamics and mechanisms through which imperialist border governance agents – including the EU and the US via NATO and the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the Pentagon’s outpost in Africa – attempt to maintain control over the Mediterranean. It examines the historical roots and political economy of border-making and border violence in the Mediterranean and Maghreb region.

Chapter 1 offers a historical and conceptual overview of colonial border-making and anti-colonial re-imaginings. It sets out how, in addition to their brute violence, the power of (neo)colonial borders lies in their being seen as natural. Contrary to their representation in mainstream media and academia, borders have not always existed in their current form and in fact have transformed the centuries-old fluidity of human movement, identities and socio-economic exchanges in the Maghreb, creating rigid structures that are designed to fragment, capture and facilitate accumulation. This chapter also explores the structural effects of border imperialism, focusing in particular on unequal exchange, super-exploitation, and the global reserve army of labour.

The Navy Is Too Important To Be Left to the Admirals

Gary Anderson

At a time when the incoming administration wants to position itself to challenge China's growing strengths, namely its rapidly expanding naval fleet, it is curious that the Navy continues to decommission perfectly good warships.

The Navy has been rapidly decommissioning a variety of ships such as the failed littoral combat ship, but more troubling is the loss of needed amphibious ships and needlessly retiring the capable and vital class of cruisers.

An egregious example is the replacement of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers with the new Arleigh Burke III destroyers. Why eliminate an existing capability only for a potential future capability whilst China’s rapidly rising fleet threat poses its most potent threat just as Xi Jinping plans to unify China with Taiwan by force if necessary.

The Navy claims that upgrading the Ticonderoga class would be too expensive while many critics claim that middle aged admirals are addicted to the "new ship smell" much like their civilian counterparts buying expensive sports cars as a salve to cure mid-life crises.

I am among those in the military reform movement who suspect a darker motive, although all three may be in play.

Recalibration or Retreat? Russia's shifting Africa strategy

John Lechner & Sergey Eledinov

After a whirlwind two-year expansion into the Sahel, 2024 saw a number of setbacks for Russian military operations.

The Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner Group’s routing in Tinzaouaten laid bare issues of command and control after a half-handover of operations from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s PMC to the Ministry of Defense (MoD). The fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in December then called into question the future of Russia’s eastern Mediterranean port in Tartus and its critical airbase at Khmeimim, all against a backdrop of a grinding third year of war in Ukraine.

These developments have led some analysts to believe Russia’s influence and ability to project power in the Sahel is waning, or that the Kremlin no longer considers the Sahel and other friendly states in Africa a priority. And indeed, there are members of Russia’s military, political, and expert communities pushing to scale back Moscow’s presence on the continent, or to use Africa as a bargaining chip in any potential negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Based on conversations with Russian officers, experts, and members of the PMC community, a retreat from the Sahel, and Africa more generally, still appears unlikely. Rumor and speculation on future strategies are rife, but it is becoming clear that, after several years of expansion, Russian operations in Africa are recalibrating to better match capacity.

Defectors offer insight into mindset of North Korean soldiers fighting in Ukraine

Janis Mackey Frayer, Stella Kim and Jennifer Jett

Few people understand what may be going through the minds of North Korean soldiers fighting and dying for Russia in the war against Ukraine. But Lee Chul Eun is one of them.

Lee, 38, a North Korean defector and former soldier now living in South Korea, said it is “devastating” to see troops from the reclusive, communist-ruled North being sent abroad by leader Kim Jong Un, “only to then give up their youth for a land that is not even theirs but the foreign land of Russia.”

He is one of multiple defectors who spoke to NBC News about the training, conditions and mindset of North Korean soldiers, including their willingness to take their own lives if necessary.

Lee said his former colleagues “are essentially just sent out to be cannon fodder on the front lines.”

For the first time since they arrived in Russia in the fall, North Korean soldiers have been captured alive by Ukrainian forces, with video and photos showing one man with bandages around his jawline and another with bandaged hands.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who announced the prisoners’ apprehension earlier this month, said they were living proof that North Korea had entered the war, in a major escalation of the yearslong conflict.

Remaking the World Order: No Small Feat

Thomas E. Graham

The liberal rules-based international order it built and sustained in the years after the Second World War is disintegrating at an accelerating pace.

After a period of comity following the end of the Cold War, great-power competition has returned with a vengeance, pitting the United States against two major revisionist powers, China and Russia, meanwhile, smaller powers cozy up to one or multiple members of this unfriendly trio.

The Trump administration stressed the return of great-power competition in its National Security Strategy, and the Biden administration only amplified that view on its own. In these administrations’ telling, America’s rivals are disputing the foundations of the liberal order, including the democratic values that inspire it and the U.S. power that undergirds it.   

As the United States’ margin of superiority over other powers thins, new, mostly illiberal centers of global power such as China, arguably India, and possibly Russia, gain authority and influence. More generally, world power and dynamism are flowing away from the Euro-Atlantic community, the core of the liberal order. Although the United States resists the idea, the world is moving toward illiberal, if not necessarily anti-liberal, multipolarity. 

Navy establishing task force along with new cyber career field

Mark Pomerleau

Following the establishment of a dedicated work role for cyber personnel, the Navy is beginning to focus on building a full career path for sailors in that field — all the way up to flag officer — which also involves the creation of a new task force.

For years, the Navy was the only service that didn’t have its own work role for cyber warriors conducting operations as part of its contribution to the cyber mission force, the teams each service provides to U.S. Cyber Command. Its cyber personnel were primarily resourced from its cryptologic warfare community — which is also responsible for signals intelligence, electronic warfare and information operations, among several mission sets — leading to a neglect in cyber and having a lack of institutional expertise both in the operations community and at top echelons of leadership, according to critics.

The fiscal 2023 annual defense policy bill directed the service to create a “designator” — the service’s parlance for officer work roles who are now maritime cyber warfare officers or MCWO — and a “rating” — the service’s terminology for enlisted work roles who are now cyber warfare technicians — solely for cyberspace matters.

With those work roles in place, and readiness of those forces beginning to improve, the Navy is now focusing on building out those roles and establishing a culture for which someone in the cyber field can rise all the way up to flag officer.

The Case for Certified Strategic Planners in the U.S. Government

Robin Champ

Introduction

The importance of strategic planning and management in the U.S. government cannot be overstated in an era of complex global challenges and rapid change. Yet, too often, the task of charting the future is assigned to individuals who lack formal training in the discipline. During my 20 years of experience leading strategic planning for government agencies, I frequently observed well-intentioned but underprepared individuals attempting to navigate the intricate world of strategy.

Now, as I teach strategy to professionals from across the public sector, I see participants arrive with polished presentations they call their "strategy." These efforts often represent a good start—they are visually appealing and show an earnest desire to comply with organizational requirements—but they frequently lack actionable or measurable elements. Commonly, they are cluttered with undefined terms like "moon shots," "imperatives," and "pillars," leading to confusion and limited effectiveness. The good news is these professionals are showing up for training, determined to enhance their skills and make a meaningful impact on their organizations.

This lack of formal training and certification for strategists in the U.S. government represents a critical gap. Strategic planning—a process fundamental to organizational success and national security—requires a level of expertise that cannot be acquired through informal practice alone. While the government mandates certifications for program managers and acquisition professionals, there is no equivalent requirement for the individuals responsible for shaping the visions and plans that guide the future of our nation. This gap is more than an oversight; it is a strategic liability.

Can Trump Strike a Grand Deal With Beijing? - Analysis

Zongyuan Zoe Liu

Not long ago, Americans and Chinese mostly liked each other. In 2011, polls showed that most people in each country viewed the other favorably. Economically, the United States and China seemed inseparable. The term “Chimerica” captured this dynamic: China produced and saved; America consumed and borrowed. The relationship was celebrated as the engine of global growth, helping the world recover from the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, Chimerica is long forgotten. A 2024 Pew survey shows that 81 percent of Americans view China unfavorably, with 42 percent viewing it as an “enemy” of the United States. The turning point came in 2012, when presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney blamed China for job losses to court swing voters in Ohio.

China has lost America. U.S. President Donald Trump did not cause the rift between Washington and Beijing, but so far, he has shown little interest in fixing it.

Both the United States and China are trudging down a similar path of disillusionment. The difference is that the United States has domestic resources and friendly neighbors that make it more likely to muddle through its challenges, while China faces a steeper climb due to resource constraints and volatile neighbors.

Trump Faces New Battleground in Latin America With China and Russia

Ellie Cook

While elected on an America-first, isolationist platform, freshly reinstalled U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have quickly homed in on Latin America.

The interactions hitting the headlines have not been positive. Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, turned back U.S. military aircraft carrying deported citizens from the country, before Trump hit back in a very public threat to level tariffs against Bogotá.

Colombia then backed down, agreeing to "all" of Trump's terms "without limitation or delay," the White House said.

Closer to home, Trump's threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, a major maritime trade hub, over what the president called excessive charges on the U.S. sparked backlash from the country that has controled the canal for more than a quarter of a century.

"We reject in its entirety everything that Mr. Trump has said," said Panama's President, José Raúl Mulino. "First, because it is false, and second because the Panama Canal belongs to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama."

These incidents, just days into the Republican's second term in office, complicate the new administration's task of beating back Russian, Chinese and Iranian roots taking hold in Latin America.

Crimson Moon Rising

Maurice "Duc" Duclos

Kai pressed deeper into the rubble as drone rotors sliced through the night. Five machines hunting through Old Town's ruins, their whine like angry insects searching for prey.

Beside him, Liang went still as one dropped lower. Through broken concrete, they studied their target - the former police headquarters, now the occupation's interrogation center. Floodlights carved razor shadows across steel walls. The utility tunnel entrance waited exactly where Mei said it would be in the east yard.

The drone's buzz vibrated through the concrete at their backs. Not the usual security models. New sensors hung beneath sleek frames, predatory.

"Different design," Liang breathed, hand moving to his weapon. The drone swept past, missing them by meters.

Kai raised his camera, the telephoto lens finding the tunnel entrance. Working fast, he documented guard positions, cameras, the power box for the electrified fence. If Ying was still alive inside, they'd have one chance.

The drone banked sharply, dropping closer. Dust swirled beneath its rotors as it hovered directly overhead. Neither man breathed. Its sensors probed the darkness around them, hunting

"Time to go." Kai's whisper was lost in the drone's whine. They retreated through the ruins, using broken walls and twisted rebar for cover. The mechanical buzz followed them but grew fainter as they put distance between themselves and the facility.

The Classic Art of War Requires Integrating All Elements of Power

H.R. McMaster

In Ran Baratz’s essay “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military” and Victor Davis Hanson’s response, titled “What We Have Forgotten About War,” the authors lament the disease of strategic incompetence in Israel and the United States. They also diagnose its causes and prescribe therapies. In so doing they advance arguments that are important to consider and act upon. The inability to employ military forces effectively in combination with other instruments of national power is dangerous as Israel and the United States face persistent threats to their security. Sadly, their examination of the erosion of strategic competence across eight decades indicates that we remain unlikely to learn from even our most recent strategic failures and disappointments.

Baratz and Hanson trace the erosion of competence to the displacement of classical strategy and military history with social science-based theories during the cold war. Baratz’s critique is consistent with that of Colin Gray in his 1971 Foreign Policy essay, “What Rand Hath Wrought,” in which Gray lamented the “economic conflict model” that “men of ideas” used without recognizing the impracticability of that model in “the world of action.” Their analysis is also consistent with my interpretation of U.S. failure in the Vietnam War in my 1997 book Dereliction of Duty. Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense from 1961–1968, and the “whiz kids” who joined him in the Pentagon viewed human relations through the lenses of rational-choice economics and systems analysis. Their conceit made them vulnerable to mirror-imaging an enemy driven by an ideology they did not comprehend.

The New AI Panic

Karen Hao

For decades, the Department of Commerce has maintained a little-known list of technologies that, on grounds of national security, are prohibited from being sold freely to foreign countries. Any company that wants to sell such a technology overseas must apply for permission, giving the department oversight and control over what is being exported and to whom.

These export controls are now inflaming tensions between the United States and China. They have become the primary way for the U.S. to throttle China’s development of artificial intelligence: The department last year limited China’s access to the computer chips needed to power AI and is in discussions now to expand the controls. A semiconductor analyst told The New York Times that the strategy amounts to a kind of economic warfare.

The battle lines may soon extend beyond chips. Commerce is considering a new blockade on a broad category of general-purpose AI programs, not just physical parts, according to people familiar with the matter. (I am granting them anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.) Although much remains to be seen about how the controls would roll out—and, indeed, whether they will ultimately roll out at all—experts described alarming stakes. If enacted, the limits could generate more friction with China while weakening the foundations of AI innovation in the U.S.

The GPT Era Is Already Ending

Matteo Wong

This week, OpenAI launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called “the smartest model in the world”—a generative-AI program whose capabilities are supposedly far greater, and more closely approximate how humans think, than those of any such software preceding it. The start-up has been building toward this moment since September 12, a day that, in OpenAI’s telling, set the world on a new path toward superintelligence.

That was when the company previewed early versions of a series of AI models, known as o1, constructed with novel methods that the start-up believes will propel its programs to unseen heights. Mark Chen, then OpenAI’s vice president of research, told me a few days later that o1 is fundamentally different from the standard ChatGPT because it can “reason,” a hallmark of human intelligence. Shortly thereafter, Altman pronounced “the dawn of the Intelligence Age,” in which AI helps humankind fix the climate and colonize space. As of yesterday afternoon, the start-up has released the first complete version of o1, with fully fledged reasoning powers, to the public. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

On the surface, the start-up’s latest rhetoric sounds just like hype the company has built its $157 billion valuation on. Nobody on the outside knows exactly how OpenAI makes its chatbot technology, and o1 is its most secretive release yet. The mystique draws interest and investment. “It’s a magic trick,” Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington and prominent critic of the AI industry, recently told me. An average user of o1 might not notice much of a difference between it and the default models powering ChatGPT, such as GPT-4o, another supposedly major update released in May. Although OpenAI marketed that product by invoking its lofty mission—“advancing AI technology and ensuring it is accessible and beneficial to everyone,” as though chatbots were medicine or food—GPT-4o hardly transformed the world.

The DeepSeek Wake-Up Call

Matteo Wong

Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.

So far, China has lagged the U.S. in the AI race. DeepSeek suggests that the country has gained significant ground: The chatbot was built more quickly and with less money than analogous models in the U.S., and also appears to use less computing power. Software developers using DeepSeek pay roughly 95 percent less per word than they do with OpenAI’s top model. One prominent AI executive wrote that DeepSeek was a “wake up call for America.” Because DeepSeek appears to be cheaper and more efficient than similarly capable American AI models, the tech industry’s enormous investments in computer chips and data centers have been thrown into doubt—so much that the top AI chipmaker, Nvidia, lost $600 billion in market value on Monday, the largest single-day drop in U.S. history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that it was “invigorating to have a new competitor” and that, in response, the company would move up some new software announcements. (Yesterday morning, OpenAI said that it is investigating whether DeepSeek used ChatGPT outputs to train its own model.)

Google: Over 57 Nation-State Threat Groups Using AI for Cyber Operations

Ravie Lakshmanan

Over 57 distinct threat actors with ties to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have been observed using artificial intelligence (AI) technology powered by Google to further enable their malicious cyber and information operations.

"Threat actors are experimenting with Gemini to enable their operations, finding productivity gains but not yet developing novel capabilities," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a new report. "At present, they primarily use AI for research, troubleshooting code, and creating and localizing content."

Government-backed attackers, otherwise known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups, have sought to use its tools to bolster multiple phases of the attack cycle, including coding and scripting tasks, payload development, gathering information about potential targets, researching publicly known vulnerabilities, and enabling post-compromise activities, such as defense evasion.

Describing Iranian APT actors as the "heaviest users of Gemini," GTIG said the hacking crew known as APT42, which accounted for more than 30% of Gemini use by hackers from the country, leveraged its tools for crafting phishing campaigns, conducting reconnaissance on defense experts and organizations, and generating content with cybersecurity themes.

Some Say AI Is the Greatest Invention of All Time. I Don’t Get It.

Freddie deBoer

The conversation about artificial intelligence remains absurd, hype-ridden, and utterly out of touch with actual material reality. I could have written that sentence in 2024, 2023, or 2022, and it would have also been true. But it felt particularly true earlier this week, when America woke to the news that the stock price of Nvidia, a Silicon Valley company responsible for a lot of our AI breakthroughs, had tanked because a Chinese start-up had succeeded in quickly and cheaply making comparable models.

Many, many powerful people have said that artificial intelligence is one of the most important human inventions of all time. My reaction to them is: Wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Here’s an important human invention: plumbing. Bringing fresh water from one place to another, and disposing of human waste via engineering. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes could do this, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period when most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And as cool as launching satellites and orbiting the earth and traveling to the moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

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