When Chinese AI research lab DeepSeek released R1, an open weights AI model that was on par with OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, the response from many in the American media and industry circles was swift and alarmist. The achievement was quickly framed as a "Sputnik moment"—a term evoking the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the subsequent Cold War space race. This analogy is misleading: R1 is not a disruptive step change with military and geopolitical implications, it’s just a great example of dogged engineering that produced a capable model.

Learn more at https://www.computerspeak.co/p/deepseek-brings-out-the-war-hawks-cold-war-rhetoric