Chinese AI has Silicon Valley spooked while copyright and AI issues continue, internet filtering to reduce copyright piracy re-emerges in the US and Spotify talks up its importance in music while reducing music royalties.
As often happens, AI dominated the news cycle again this week. When it comes to DeepSeek, you may be asking yourself, WTF now?! And you aren’t alone. The Chinese AI player rivaling the best of Silicon Valley seemingly came out of nowhere. I look at what it is and why it has the US AI industry worried.
Also, the US Copyright Office reaffirms the importance of human creativity if AI outputs are to be protected, blocking foreign piracy websites is back on the agenda in the US and bundled Spotify subscriptions are impacting music royalties even as the streaming giant boasts about its importance to the music industry.
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What's going on?
Here’s what I’ve noticed this week:
DeepSeek has the US AI industry scared
DeepSeek has low cost, efficiency and being open source going for it, but being Chinese made is a big hurdle.
The AI space is fast moving and is a disruptive force, but the formal release of the DeepSeek-R1 model this week shows that even AI can be disrupted. You can be forgiven for having never heard of DeepSeek until recently. Their first major reasoning model – DeepSeek-V3 – was released on Christmas Day. That started a bit of a buzz. Since then, there has been plenty of praise and raised eyebrows in the industry for the Chinese AI maker. Its AI tools are absolutely viable contesters for any Silicon Valley AI system currently on the market.
