DeepSeek the Stock Market and Open Source AI

So you have heard of DeepSeek - the new Chinese open source AI that caused the stock prices of US tech giants to plummet.

1 trillion US$ where "lost" in one day.

That is a million millions.

So there are 3 points that people do not talk about enough:

First: This is your money that you got back now!

If you believe the capitalist theory then these stock prices represent what the shareholders think about the future profits of this companies.

So if the stock price of a company falls then the shareholders expect that it will make less money in the future.

So where would that money come from? It would come from your pocket. They would make you depend on the technology they are selling and you would be paying for it. So this future earnings is the money you directly our indirectly pay.

Now you have an open source model that you can use free of charge and it even needs less computing power so you do not need to pay for expensive hardware or expensive cloud computing. So you are saving money in the future.

So this means: The stock market just told you that you will be saving 1 Trillion US Dollar in the future. Or in other words: This small Chinese company gifted humanity some 1 Trillion Dollar.

This is 120 Dollar for each person on our planet!

Second: so called "Intelectual Property"

Now OpenAI complains that DeepSeek has "stolen" their intellectual property by using their ChatGPT to train the new model. A lot of people have already pointed out how hypocritical this is as OpenAI used all of humanities knowledge to train their AI and did not care much about the rights there.

But the real point is that the DeepSeek model is now open source. This means that we as humanity now get the knowledge back and can use it. So not only is it fair that DeepSeek used this. This is kind of a digital "Robin Hood" which gives back to us what has been stolen from us.

In fact there should be a law that all AI models must be open source since they all use humanities knowledge.

I would argue that the concept of so called "Intellectual Property" is an absurdity in the first place. It is a way to create artificial scarcity. To make something artificially rare in order to be able to trade within the capitalist logic. Something that otherwise could benefit all of humanity without extra costs.

Third: Geopolitics

A lot of people also mention the geopolitical side of this. So now it is clear that China is not far behind the US in this important technological development or maybe is even already ahead.

So these people stress how important it is that these technologies are under democratic control.

Now certainly China has some shortcomings when it comes to democracy. But I can not believe the hypocrisy here. The US tech corporations obviously have already bought this elections and Elon Musk proudly brags how he bought the election for Trump. And Trump is on its way to turn the USA into a fascist dictatorship. However you think about China but it should be clear for anyone that the US are no longer the "good guys". Not since 20th of January this year.

So we should be really thankful to DeepSeek that it helped so much to democratize the power of AI by giving it directly to us.

Franz Schaefer (Mond), Jan 2025

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