Hardware restrictions forced resourceful innovation that beat U.S. competitors.
The U.S. imposed chip export bans to limit China’s AI capabilities, assuming that without advanced hardware, AI development would stall. However, AI is software, created differently compared to a nuclear facility, making traditional protectionist measures ineffective or even counterproductive. DeepSeek, banned from using top hardware, ended up building a really resourceful approach and became better than top U.S. AI companies. This demonstrates that AI models are math and neural networks, essentially stacked linear regressions within activation functions that one cannot protect easily.
— DeepSeek - New Economic Rules And Regulatory Challenge · Forbes