Is DeepSeek a Sputnik Moment for America? | Nicolas Chaillan

the Chinese AI app deep seek recently became the most downloaded iPhone app in the US and caused us tech stocks to plummet president Donald Trump described it as a wakeup call for American companies so what's really going on is deep seek as powerful as people say or is there a bigger story here they were able to disrupt half a trillion dollar of of market share market cap shorting the stock and making a whole bunch of money at the same time with really nothing to back it up just noise and completely manipulating the market that's scary today I'm sitting down with AI expert Nicholas cheyen former Chief software officer for the US Air Force and now founder of the generative AI company ask AG he's worried that the US Department of Defense is falling Wolly behind China when it comes to adopting AI technology in the military what you see is the CCP adopting at incredible amount of velocity and speed beu GPT and deep seek models even the new Alibaba models into their military uh networks this is American thought leaders and I'm y Kell Nicholas Cheyenne such a pleasure to have you back on American thought leaders good to see you so deep seek has been described by some as a Sputnik moment a second Sputnik moment for America what do you think I don't think that's that easy right uh when you look at what happened effectively you see China particularly the CCP manipulating markets and you know it's kind of interesting to see how quickly uh us companies and also in investors in different uh markets reacted to this uh news fake news ready which was okay China has created a better model with very small investment in gpus using you know the older models of uh gpus of Nvidia and none of it is true you know when you start digging into uh what happened you find that uh you know that company is really led by uh you know investors that have been investing around crypto for a while they had access to about 50,000 H1 100 latest Nvidia uh chips and also the models are not that good you know not only they tremendous bias baked into the models of course coming directly from CCP uh propaganda but you also see something pretty insane which is they ingested immense amount of data coming from open Ai and other companies which you know everybody does but at the end of the day what you also see is these models being trained to pass the benchmarks that are used to decide whether or not you know they are better and quite honestly when you use them in real life with real use cases that we do here we find pretty quickly they're not up to Paul and quite behind what you see with the latest models from open Ai and Google and even meta so you know I think it's it's important to realize that they're leading in many fields and they know how to manipulate opinions and markets which is you know they they they shorted the stocks they made you know hundreds of billions of money by doing this announcement and so they are smarter than us and play a better game to manipulate what's going on in the United States and even in Europe but Sly this is not a Sputnik when it comes to AI uh we need to be at the top of our game and we need to make sure uh the government is adopting the best us companies capabilities but it does not mean that China is leading right now when it comes to these models but it still is something that we need to pay attention to because at the end of the day they might be winning Nick I'm going to get you to unpack a few things for me before I go further for example you said that they're being trained this deep seek AI is being trained against the benchmarks before we talk talk about that um tell me exactly what it means to train an AI for those of our that are uninitiated well most of the time the way um these large language models are train is literally ingesting massive amount of data uh to pretty much capture everything that exists and in fact they're running out of money so they are creating new data by using Lage models to actually create new content because we're running out of data to ingest and so it's not surprising that you s all these lawsuits not only with open AI but also other companies and now you're seeing you know deep seek also ingesting effectively uh data directly from open AI using their apis their technology to generate responses and including of course their documentation and all these things that's pretty common and that's the way you know these models are trained and it's very difficult to then change the way these models are going to behave because they get this bias from the content ingested based on the volume of data ingested so it's very difficult uh for deep seek to then remove facts that are you know automatically ingested uh via all this you know massive amount of data and so that's why you see the models initially answering the questions about you know president shei and and all the the information that China is trying to suppress uh but then they have a safety mechanisms to look at the response and override the answer and that's how they still hiding you know all the uh the the the moment in history that China doesn't want us to know about you know Nick on this point it seems to me like such an odd thing that the model will actually show you the answer for a split second and then basically say sorry I can't show that to you right um I was just looking at a recent tweet TW from a a user who asked hundreds of times about tmen Square for example and kept getting the same answer and it sort of it appeared to quote unquote trigger the AI into saying look enough don't ask me this question anymore um but is it almost seems intentional that they're show because they would absolutely have to show you that there was an answer and then hide it do you do you make sense of this so the way these uh special models called the rezoning models work is you see the reasoning first and that used not to be the case right that's very recent with the new 01 models coming from open AI uh these were the first models that resonate first uh throughout a very detailed process of thinking and the longer he thinks the longer the response gets to become better um and cost more money to to generate of course um and so what's interesting is they're showing you the uh thinking which many models don't show you that and they only show you the response and so by showing the thinking they have no way to hide what the model is doing behind the scene and when the response is ready it triggers their uh safety uh mechanisms to then remove the answer but it's too late because of course the thinking and the resoning of the model is there for everyone to see and you can see all those in sites being shared to the user and so that's kind of The Da Side of reasoning models they have no mechanisms to hide that tell me very quickly how is it that you know that they didn't use this low amount of computing power that they claim it's pretty obvious when you look at the research that first of all you know 56 million do investment is is just plain ridiculous but really at the end of the day that's what you know the CCP does right they they lie about every number on the planet um and so you know when you see all that access to these uh beefier chips and uh when you look at the background and the knowledge of the people behind deep seek it's pretty obvious to anyone that they know what they're doing and they have access to a pretty much unlimited amount of uh compute and also uh funding and so you know when you see the uh the numbers just don't lie and you know the CCP does Nick we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back in a moment and we're back with Nicholas Shan former Chief software officer of the Air Force and space force and now founder of ask Sage so the bottom line is you know they launched this thing and kind of wowed the world wowed the markets wowed users but then when you look under the hood it's really not nearly what it appeared it's not I mean it's not don't get me wrong they still had very good um outcomes when it came when it came to the uh training methods and they they did come up with ways to to be more efficient and save money um and there's def definitely value there of course the fact that it's uh the CCP behind it and biased and and you know uh with a bunch of madeup aners that kind of kills the entire value in my opinion because how you going to trust it even in math even in research you have you know they could they could train it in a way that you know if you ask a question in English you get um answers that are not as good as if you were to ask it in Chinese for example that would be easy to do um so again I would never trust it um and so that defeat the point of using it the numbers and the benchmarks and the amount of money that that they spent to train it is completely uh made up and we I don't believe in one second and it might Sly not be as much money as you know we spent on open AI 03 or 01 but it's still way more than they're claiming a thousand times more so when you uh left the air force uh when you left being the software Chief over there back in 2021 I think when around the time when we first spoke on online you said you believe that the US has really lost the war or on the cusp of losing the war in AI but you sound more optimistic today so it's always interesting I always said that the US was doing very well but the dod was losing and I think that's something that's it's a little detail that's being lost uh in Translation with my French accent off uh and I think that's the most important fact um what you see is the CCP adopting at incredible amount of velocity and speed their latest you know beu GPT and deep seek models and and you know even the new Alibaba models into their military uh networks at scale across classification levels on very complex weapon systems and uh you know why while the models are less good and less capable than the US models unfortunately the US has a massive wall and lack of adoption of the best of breed us capabilities into the Department of Defense and so what you end up seeing is the US leading compared to China when it comes to companies but when he comes to defense which is quite honestly the most important use of AI we could think about in 2025 and Beyond you see DOD being at least 5 years behind China and it's compounding by the fact that these models augment uh and empower the velocity of people up to you know 20 to 50x so one person turning into 50 people and let's face it the CCP already has more people and now they they turn these people to 50 times more thanks to being augmented and empowered by AI it's almost impossible to compete particularly if you don't have access to the to AI capabilities and so where I'm Vue concerned is the the amount of money spent particularly during the the bid Administration for four years on AI ethics and other you know massive amount of money Wasted by research teams uh building their own DOD capabilities like nipo GPT that that just you know are years behind what you see companies do and really push us even further behind China tell me a little bit about the intersection of AI and nuclear capability this strikes me as something that's very important because you mentioned some of the limitations right now of AI usage in DOD yeah it's it's you know there's a few fields that um are super essential to winning the next battles right and and DOD is lagging behind and we're very excited to see a new Administration that is eager to focus on you know all these fields including hypersonics Quantum compute AI uh you know drones right and and ready uh you know even the nuclear uh deterrence of the United States is uh already uh in shambles because of you know some delays we've been seeing in some programs that we're running uh again lagging behind a schedule and you know way over budget we're talking you know 10x over budget um and so it's concerning uh we need to do better we need to be less complacent we need to have more urgency to get things done and more importantly we need to understand the kind of fights we're going to be fighting uh moving forward and I'm not sure it's going to be much about Jets and and bombers although they they still need to be you know at the top of their Innovation game uh but it's going to be also about uh you know uh software and um drones and AI capabilities to empower humans to make better faster decisions and quite honestly uh right now the money spent on those domains were mostly wasted in paper uh research like Dei uh research on AI or ethics we spend so much money debating whether or not to use AI uh in a in a DOD which which is just mind bugling to me you know China is not wasting time want pondering life whether or not they should use AI uh in their weapon systems and if they have it and we don't it's the same as saying maybe we just you know don't do nuclear systems anymore and you know China has it and so be it but I don't think that's a good answer and I I don't think anyone would want to be a living in that world Nick I have to ask you about this ethics piece I mean it's one thing to say whether it should be used at all it's a different thing not to have some significant ethical guidelines and you're right those guidelines may not exist in communist China at all but you know you can kind of Imagine yes autonomous weapon systems driven by AI that do what they want you know there's there's been very popular movies made about this right uh we definitely don't want that clearly we have to have some kind of ethical framework we do but it doesn't mean you spend 100% on your of your budget on ethics U you know if if I were to pick I would probably spend you know 5% of the budget on ethics and 95% on capabilities and and look we're so far away from uh autonomous weapons powered by AI you know uh I agree that we should be very ious when it comes to uh putting you know Aon weapons they they the fact is um we're going to we're going to have to get there uh smartly but we're going to have to get there because China is going to do it and we demonstrated when we did Doug fights you know with jets uh that uh humans lost every single time against Jets powered by AI with no human on board um and so you know humans don't have the ability uh to uh to move as fast and make decisions as fast as technology um and so we're going to need to find a way to uh compete against these new weapons and you don't want to be the one playing catchup you know one thing that I think we all know from uh World War II and the nuclear weapons is being the first was important and and playing catch up is is never good and so we can just you know dismiss the importance of getting autonomous weapons uh powered by AI with you know still control from humans but the fact is at some point when you get into a fight and it's it's it's a it's a face-to-face fight between two weapons two AI power weapons the human to some degree needs to allow the fight to begin and then get out of the way to let us win and and so that's the world we live in we can pretend it's not happening we and pretend you know and everybody uh says well you know we could have China sign you know some agreement and treaty to say they're not going to do that but they will sign it and do it anyways right so we can't take that chance and and and quite honestly we're so far away from those weapons which scares me even more because China is not and so we need to keep that in mind as well fascinating something I've been seeing a lot of videos of recently is these incred inredible light displays which are actually something like tens of thousands of drones being used in coordination and you know people have been noticing and I've been thinking about you know the of course the military potential of this kind of Technology um have you thought about this and where are we at with that I pushed back in 2018 the creation of a special office to uh go after uh the defensive side of the this and also the offensive side of swarming Technologies honestly we we have not done nearly enough to even uh comprehend what can be done with those swarming Technologies the speed and the cost of these devices are mindboggling and most people don't even know how quickly these things can move and the time it would take to react by the time you even understand what's going on the attack is already over and you have nothing to do left to do um so I I can tell you it's probably one of the biggest threat and not just from the CCP but also from from terrorist organizations quite honestly the cost being so low nowadays and the technology being so accessible uh there's really no barrier to entry and the fact that we're not spending significant of amount of money in the defense budget and at DHS as well to uh go be above and beyond uh to understand and have answers to prevent those attacks is uh very concerning um give me a scenario of what one of these attacks might look like you know SK elim with the attacks they could put explosives on some of these drones but even just using them to crash into things and and just you know there so many things that can be done with staming Technologies to disrupt you know a traffic control uh to disrupt airspace I mean you know sky is a limit um there's almost nothing you cannot do with it from putting you know weapons to uh putting bombs on on them uh or just dropping them from the sky and hit you know people and objects and uh it's it's a very concerning uh capability and when you see how well coordinated these can be and disconnected as as well which means if they lose control they can still continue to behave and Achieve uh whatever it is they were programmed to do uh so a lot of the technology we used to disrupt uh their capabilities uh would would not be impacted because they would still fly and go do what they're trying to do um and many commercial drones are designed to fall out the sky if they lose you know control uh from the controller um and I'll just go back land where they took off uh the the military version of these drones can be programmed to continue uh doing what the last you know instructions they were given and so a lot of the um technology we used to disable those drones would just not uh work efficiently to to stop these attacks and honestly people go back to basic uh means like eagles and other things but again you know we don't have nearly half of the volume of Eagles or you know uh Birds to go attack these drones so again and the Nets technology and all that this is not realistic against a massive swarming attack and so I think we really need to wake up well Nicholas shyan it's such a pleasure to have had you on again thanks for having me thank you all for joining Nicholas Tren and me on this episode of American thought leaders I am your host Yan Kell