DeepSeek · China · United Kingdom · The Guardian Technology
Why Britain should reject the lure of cheap, and scary, Chinese AI
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There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.
Key facts
- Go back 10 years and Xi Jinping’s close supporters were alert to the internal contradictions of a totalitarian, command and control state apparatus and how it could trigger social unrest, much as it
- Now Beijing has huge surveillance capabilities, using AI to capture images of its citizens and monitor their activities if they need
- As Ross Burley says, Chinese AI comes with extra baggage
- Meanwhile, Chinese developers are launching AI models by the dozen each month at a fraction of the cost of US equivalents
Summary
Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence. In Britain, they love cheap Chinese kit, usually setting aside any concerns about how it was made and who by. The row over whether to allow Chinese electric cars unfettered access to British retail forecourts is a case in point. It’s scary because Beijing is entering a new phase in the long march of economic development, taking the world’s second largest economy closer to making China great again.