Chinese AI’s Sputnik Moment
This time, the great leap forward had Washington’s help. This post was also published in National Review What made the Soviets’ successful launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 a major crisis for America was our realization that Soviet technology had leapt ahead of the West in the space race. Nearly 70 years later, a new Chinese AI model should sound similar alarm bells across the West — not least because this time, U.S. policy is partly to blame. The release of China’s free, open-source DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 showed China was closing the gap with American AI faster than Western analysts expected. Still, it was not quite a Sputnik moment, because R1 was optimized for Nvidia chips. Consequently, even if you wanted to run advanced Chinese AI models, you still needed American-made chips and developer tools. That advantage has now vanished. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, took the world by surprise because it was optimized for Huawei chips. Even before DeepSeek V4,...
