Opinion | DeepSeek and the feared A. I. Drivel That Trump and Biden Met To Resign

When China’s technology sector unveiled DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence model that works on par with America’s best but that may have been developed for less money and despite trade restrictions on A. I. chips, it rudely shocked the U. S. tech sector, and the stock market as well.

There have been numerous frantic inquiries since then to determine how and whether everything went well. These are not the most significant inquiries, and the excessive focus on them is an illustration of how we initially got caught off guard.

The real lesson of DeepSeek is that America’s approach to A. I. safety and regulations — the concerns espoused by both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as by many A. I.companies— was largely nonsense. It was never going to be possible to stop the spread of this potent emerging technology, and not just by enforcing trade restrictions on components like graphic chips. That was a self-serving fiction, foisted on out-of-touch leaders by an industry that wanted the government to kneecap its competitors.

The government and industry should be preparing our society for the radical changes that are about to occur rather than making a futile effort to keep this genie bottled up.

The misguided emphasis on containment is a belated echo of the nuclear era, when the United States and others curbed the flow of atomic weapons by restricting access to enriched uranium, by keeping an eye on what some scientists were doing, and by sending inspectors into labs and military installations. Those measures, backed up by the occasional show of force, had a clear effect. The world hasn’t blown up — yet.

However, one significant difference is that only a few highly trained scientists at the cutting-edge of their fields could have developed nuclear weapons. The core idea that powers the artificial intelligence revolution, on the other hand, has been . The arrival of large data sets (via the internet and other digital technologies ) and then of powerful graphic processors ( like those from Nvidia ), which can compute A. I. models from those data troves, opened the floodgates.