No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses.
The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, “one giant leap for mankind”, in Neil Armstrong’s historic words as he took a “small step” on to the surface of the moon.
It was a significant moment in the cold war, too. A confidential White House report worried that “American prestige” had “sustained a severe blow”, giving the USSR “clear advantage in the cold war”. That fear spurred Washington into reshaping its space programme, and catalysed the Apollo missions, culminating with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming, on 20 July 1969, the first humans to walk upon another celestial body.
DeepSeek, sponsored by a Chinese hedge fund, is a notable achievement. Technically, though, it is no advance on large language models (LLMs) that already exist. It is neither faster nor “cleverer” than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude and just as prone to “hallucinations” – the tendency, exhibited by all LLMs, to give false answers or to make up “facts” to fill gaps in its data. According to NewsGuard, a rating system for news and information websites, DeepSeek’s chatbot made false claims 30% of the time and gave no answers to 53% of questions, compared with 40% and 22% respectively for the 10 leading chatbots in NewsGuard’s most recent audit.
The figures expose the profound unreliability of all LLMs. DeepSeek’s particularly high non-response rate is likely to be the product of its censoriousness; it refuses to provide answers on any issue that China finds sensitive or about which it wants facts restricted, whether Tiananmen Square or Taiwan.
The true impact of DeepSeek is not on the technology but on the economics of AI. It is a chatbot as capable, and as flawed, as other current leading models, but built at a fraction of
