[The Free Press] On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, a 184-pound satellite, into Earth’s orbit. The satellite didn’t do much—it just "beeped" over radio waves. But those beeps sounded a wake-up call for the United States.
Fearful of falling behind its Cold War strategic rival, the federal government launched an expensive crash program to spur technological development. The U.S. went from a laggard in the space race to unified, fast-moving behemoth. By 1969, we had landed men on the moon, a feat the Soviets never accomplished. And more than that: The Sputnik moment began decades of across-the-board American dominance in science and engineering.
Now comes what many are calling a new Sputnik moment: the release of DeepSeek, a low cost, high-performing Chinese-created artificial intelligence (AI) model. The analogy is a bit imprecise though—and probably understates the significance of last week’s event.
Rockets are bounded by the laws of physics and the scarcity and movement of materials—which is why we say that hardware is hard. The only constraint on software development is the human imagination. Small, far-flung teams can accomplish extraordinary things. If a rocket explodes, it takes 12 months to get the next one built. Software can instantly be replicated 7 billion times into every human’s pocket. And updated seamlessly.
Another difference: The space race (notwithstanding its many peace dividends) was primarily focused on the next weapons of war—ICBMs and the like. Building leading AI or, better yet, artificial general intelligence, is more like building the brain layer for everything—weapons, yes, but also "agents" for almost every kind of imaginable work, and potentially the source of almost all knowledge and information to be consumed by humans in the future.
Whoever controls AI will control the answers to questions like: What happened on June 4, 1989? How many genders are there? Did Covid-19 lockdowns work? What’s happening in Israel? What happens when you ask AI these questions depends on who created the AI, where it’s hosted, and what information it was trained on. Which is why every cultural warrior and government wants to control AI.
And, unlike rockets, AI models are fundamentally "black boxes" that can be observed, but not deterministically explained. AI models generate responses probabilistically, meaning they weigh countless possibilities and choose outputs based on likelihood rather than fixed rules. This makes them flexible but also unpredictable—and if adversaries control the models, they could manipulate the underlying probabilities to subtly distort truth, influence decisions, or spread falsehoods at scale. This makes the geopolitical risk of having an adversary control these "brains" real. The space race operated at the intersection of national pride and national defense; the AI race is about so much more—and progressing at breakneck speed.
Unlike rockets, AI is primarily bounded by math, compute (the processing power needed to train an AI model), and data.
For the math part, it’s largely vector math—linear algebra and multivariable calculus. China finished first in the International Mathematical Olympiad from 2019 to 2023, with a United States team of four Chinese Americans (out of six team members) finally besting China in 2024. China is very, very good at math.
There’s a joke that in every International Mathematical Olympiad, the top teams are China versus those of Chinese background. It’s why the allegations that DeepSeek is some kind of Communist psyop ring hollow. While it’s hard to confirm the exact amount of money spent or chips used to train the model, China is the world leader in human capital around this type of work, so it’s not surprising to see a tremendous advance come from that nation.
By making its model open-source, the Chinese hedge fund behind DeepSeek has confirmed how counterproductive the Biden administration’s pro-containment, pro-hegemony, anti-open source AI strategy had been.
Biden issued an executive order which sought to constrain compute under an arbitrary threshold, bar open source as an alleged threat to national security, and effectively allow regulatory capture by the biggest players. The administration and its enablers wanted to limit math, and in turn, limit code—but ended up just limiting America’s lead. 
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