Scale AI CEO says China has quickly caught up with the US with DeepSeek

The US may have led China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.

Wang, whose company provides training data to major AI players including OpenAI, google and Metasaid Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, China’s leading AI lab DeepSeek released a “ground-breaking model” on Christmas Day, and then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-based AI model, DeepSeek-R1. , which competes with OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.

“What we found is that DeepSeek … performs the best, or roughly equal to the best American models,” Wang said.

In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the US and China as an “AI war”, adding that he believes China has much more. Nvidia H100 GPUs — the AI ​​chips widely used to build powerful AI models — are cheaper than people might think, especially given US export controls.

Wang also said he believes the AI ​​sector will reach $1 trillion, in line with estimates that the market for creative AI is ready. $1 trillion largest income in a decade.

“The U.S. is going to need a lot of computing power, a lot of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding, “We need to free up the energy of the U.S. to enable this AI boom.”

This week, the president Donald Trump announce a joint venture with OpenAI, the oracle and SoftBank billion to invest in US AI infrastructure. The project, Stargate, was presented at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. They will be key early technology partners Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, also a semiconductor company the arm. They said they will invest 500 billion dollars to start and over the next four years.

In an interview Thursday, Wang said he thinks it will take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a much-cited but vaguely defined branch of AI technology used in the AI ​​industry. it surpasses human intelligence in many tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we’re close to achieving it and others saying it’s not possible. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful AI systems that are able to use a computer like you or me… and basically be a remote worker in the most capable way.”

Anthropogenic AmazonBacked by AI startup OpenAI, founded by former research directors, it ramped up its technology development over the past year, and in October, the startup he said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and complete tasks through any software and browse the internet in real time, the startup said.

The tool “can use computers basically the way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said he can perform tasks in “dozens or hundreds of steps.”

OpenAI they are supposed to be plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

Asked which US artificial intelligence startups are leading the AI ​​race right now, Wang said each model has its strengths; for example, OpenAI’s models excel at reasoning, and Anthropic excels at coding.

“The space is getting more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of DeepSeek’s reasoning-based AI model, DeepSeek-R1.