The US Commerce Department are now investigating whether DeepSeek have used AI chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, with the restrictions previously put in place by the US so that the country can win the so-called “AI race” against China.
According to Reuters, which sourced a person familiar with the matter, an organised AI chip smuggling ring has been tracked out of a number of countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
For context, current restrictions on Nvidia artificial intelligence processors are meant to stop its most sophisticated chips from reaching China, though the US Commerce Department think maybe Chinese companies such as DeepSeek did somehow get their hands on them.
However, DeepSeek have clarified that they used the previous generation H800 chips by Nvidia, which they could legally purchase in 2023. And that they also have the less powerful H20s chips, which can still lawfully be shipped to China.
Meanwhile, Nvidia stressed that their partners comply with all applicable laws and that they haven’t received any information about their AI chips being smuggled into China.
The US government just love to cast a smear on Chinese innovation. Sore losers, that's what they are.
The above aside, the AI arms race took another turn as Beijing-based China start-up Moonshot AI have launched their latest model, Kimi k1.5 on January 25, just days after the rise of DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-R1.
While DeepSeek has already been seen as a formidable competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4, Kimi k1.5 is now being touted as an even more powerful alternative, outshining OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet on key benchmarks.
Moonshot’s Kimi k1.5 is a multimodal AI model that integrates visual, text, and code inputs to solve complex problems. It has surpassed some of OpenAI’s models by up to 550% on some benchmarks, particularly in areas like problem-solving and reasoning. Note that DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-R1 lacks multimodal capabilities.
And unsurprisingly, one of the standout features of Kimi AI is that it is completely free to use with no limits! Unlike many US competitors that operate on subscription models, Kimi aims to make advanced AI accessible to everyone as well. This approach democratizes access but also challenges traditional business models in the tech industry.
It’s the era of Chinese supremacy in generative AI, and I love it!
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