This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
On Monday, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek has released r1, its reasoning model and competitor to OpenAI’s o1 (and soon, o3). Alongside the main r1 model, the company also released distilled versions as small as 1.5 billion parameters—small enough to run locally on a modern iPhone.
r1 should be seen as a reaffirmation of something that has long been obvious: open-source frontier AI is going to be relevant for at least the foreseeable future if not much longer, and it is going to be an important vector in the broader technological and economic competition between the US and China. Open source is, therefore, an important part of American competitiveness and national security. Some people will probably still try to deny this reality, but r1 makes their job even harder.
I prefer to think of the DeepSeek release as an invitation rather than a threat. America needs to think bigger and more boldly about the things our AI systems—closed and open alike—might make possible at home and around the world.
No longer should we pretend that open-source is something that can be willed away through regulation or top-down control. Nor should we indulge the simplistic idea that open source involves “giving away our technology to China.” And no longer should be pretend that a fierce competition with China is something we can “avoid” due to fears of “AI arms race dynamics.”
By the end of 2025, the capabilities of frontier AI systems will start to push past human performance, the economic potential will become palpable to all, and America will have probably established the foundations of its AI policy regime. It’s time to set aside the platitudes and simplistic arguments. Things are starting to become serious, and the gravity of our moment requires more from us than we have so far given. I include myself in that criticism.
But it is also time to get specific. Supporters of open-source AI need to transcend vague proclamations about “decentralization of power.” What does a world with powerful open-source AI look like, really?
I’d like to give you my own perspective on this—a fragmentary and incomplete glimpse, to be sure, but a start nonetheless. Far more people should be writing concrete, positive expositions of what the world could look like under all manner of AI scenarios. Whether you like my ideas or not, I encourage you to think of this as an invitation for you to write your own vision.
