There is a partnership between OpenAI and the government
What’s the difference between a rival company like DeepSeek and its own products like ChatGPT? The North Star of the U.S.
I can read a book at the library and return it, that is one way to think about it. I have certain information. You can think of two ways to think about this: if you take the book, never return the book, or put the book out under your name. But I think that the big point – the North Star that I would just really emphasize – is that there is a real competition between the U.S. and China. The consequences of that competition are enormous.
Kelly: I did want to ask what is the difference between a rival company like DeepSeek possibly accessing your data, and you training your own products like ChatGPT on other people’s work without their permission?
The Stargate is infrastructure: What the U.S. can do to help it build a better world? Chris LeHane: Making the Most of the Stargate
LeHane says that the Stargate is infrastructure. At the end of the day, the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are in a race, a competition to see who ultimately leads in AI. The U.S. has a lead. It’s not a huge lead, but we do have a lead. The stakes are huge: Are we going to build the world on democratic, free or authoritarian Artificial Intelligence? And what will decide that is something called compute. If you add up chips, data, talent and energy, compute is what it is. If you put that full stack together, then that represents 21st century Artificial Intelligence infrastructure. And so what we announced last week with President Trump, with our partners at Oracle and SoftBank, is a $500 billion investment in U.S. AI infrastructure to generate that compute, which will help ensure that the U.S. maintains its lead in AI.
Chris LeHane. The United States National Labs is where Openai brings its leading edge innovation and technology. As research and development continues, it will be crucial that national security is supported. The innovation that we’re building and making sure we’re doing it in partnership with the U.S. government is what is bringing our leading edge technology.
Mary Louise Kelly: Start with this new partnership with the National Labs. In a few sentences, why is this a big deal? What is the time frame for it to get fruit?
LeHane: The big takeaway for us is that it’s absolutely critical that the U.S. does have the infrastructure to be able to maintain its lead. And so when you talk about the $500 billion, this is not U.S. taxpayer money. There is an understanding that with the continued advancement of artificial intelligence, there is going to be more and more of a demand for the compute that is required.
Kelly thinks that it needs to be expensive. $500 billion is a lot of money, and DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, has prompted a conversation about whether foreign rivals are doing things a lot cheaper than American companies.
You can type into a text box on a website and a mobile app, and it will talk back to you. What makes it special is how it was built. On January 20th, the startup’s most recent major release, a reasoning model called R1, dropped just weeks after the company’s last model V3, both of which began showing some very impressive AI benchmark performance. The models performed at the same level, or even better, as competing ones from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. They are completely free to use.
LeHane: We’re in the process of reviewing what may or may not have occurred. There is something that happens in the AI world called distillation. And distillation is a complex idea. But effectively, can people send a lot of stuff at your models and be able to take information out of it, and then use that information to replicate something else?
Artificial Intelligence’s Sputnik Moment and What It Is About: Verge Analysis of DeepSeek Data Driven Stargate
A selloff of tech shares caused panic and wiped more than $1 trillion off of their value. The stock market’s slide came as a huge blow to Nvidia, whose shares lost 17 percent on Monday.
For more than two years, tech executives have told us that the path to unlock the full potential of the technology was by throwing more power at the problem. Since then, scale has been the unquestioned ruler. Less than two weeks ago, OpenAI President Sam Altman went to the White House and announced a new $500 billion data center company called Stargate, which will supposedly expand OpenAI’s ability to train and deploy new models.
The aftermath has been a bloodbath, to put it lightly. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sounded the alarm, calling DeepSeek “AI’s Sputnik moment” — and that does appear to be how the AI industry and global financial markets are treating it.
The news cycle is moving fast and there is a lot going on. To break it all down and figure out where the artificial intelligence industry is headed, I invited a senior reporter for the Verge to discuss the past couple weeks on the show.
