Different Disruptions

The United States ending its World Health Organization (WHO) membership, rejecting the Paris Climate Agreement, expressing expansionist ambitions over Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Panama, and declaring trade wars in the early days of the new Trump administration contrasts sharply with another disruptive development in another part of the world – the announcement by Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek that its revolutionary AI model will be open to all. Two antipode disruptions indeed.

Disruptions in two different ways

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based company founded less than two years ago by Liang Wenfeng, an electronic information engineer and computer science guru who graduated from Zhejiang University in east China, launched an advanced open-source model that allows developers and companies around the world to adapt the technology to their specific needs.

According to Nature magazine, the DeepSeek-R1 model can solve scientific problems on par with American company OpenAI’s most advanced large language model (LLM) o1. The article went on detailing how soon after releasing the advanced DeepSeek-R1 model, DeepSeek came up with a new one called Janus-Pro-7B, which can generate images from text prompts much like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and London-based Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. Such disruptive advancements are bound to have an impact on human progress, one different from the American impact.

New technological breakthroughs have also been announced by Alibaba’s most advanced LLM, Qwen2.5-Max, unveiled on January 29, followed by new reasoning models by Moonshot AI and ByteDance, founder of TikTok.

The high-tech innovations unveiled in China come as no surprise. After all, this is the nation that invented paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, and even the locking technique that centuries later was used in the construction of the Panama Canal. In 2017, China released the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, announcing its intention to become a world leader in AI by 2030.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, apart from breaking global solidarity, seems parallelly focused on disrupting the world’s rule-based international order, and his own country’s prosperity. His intentions took form on February 1 with tariffs announced on exports from Mexico, Canada, and China.

While the first two got a reprieve, 10 percent tariffs have been imposed on Chinese exports. In the recent past, 16 Nobel economists, including American Joseph Stiglitz and British-American Angus Deaton, spoke out against tariffs, negating the idea that raising tariffs to run a trade surplus will improve a country’s economic welfare. American economist Paul Krugman stressed the “really, really destructive” nature of tariffs.

A world in dismay

It is not only the world economy that is endangered. Among the 26 executive orders signed by Trump on his first day in office, the one ending U.S. involvement in WHO in 12 months is highly dangerous as no country can claim “exceptionalism” to diseases even if they emanate from other countries, as recent pandemics have shown.

The international community is in deep shock since it means WHO’s single largest donor, accounting for 18 percent of the agency’s budget in 2023, will simply vanish, ending an “indispensable part of the international humanitarian system.” In a world where more than 300 million people need humanitarian assistance and protection, the future looks grim.

To make things worse, Washington’s withdrawal of support for the Paris Climate Agreement has endangered a consensus aimed at combating “the defining challenge of our time.” Data shows 2024 was the hottest year on record, about 1.55 °C above the pre-industrial era.

What makes the action especially mystifying is that the United States suffered 403 weather and climate disasters during the last 42 years, with the damage estimated at nearly U.S. $3 trillion. In real life that translates as the U.S. suffering the bulk of global economic losses from weather, climate and water-related hazards, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

China’s AI heroes

As for the high-tech field, the feat by DeepSeek is sending a shockwave across the Western media as a BBC headline goes “DeepSeek: How China’s ‘AI heroes’ overcame U.S. curbs to stun Silicon Valley.” The international press focused on the developer of the DeepSeek models and other leading scientists and entrepreneurs being homegrown talents, coming from Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University, and Beijing University.

DeepSeek’s founder reportedly said in an interview with Chinese media last year, “What we see is that Chinese AI cannot remain in a follower position forever,” concluding: “We often say that Chinese AI is one or two years behind the U.S., but the real gap lies between originality and imitation. If this doesn’t change, China will always be a follower. So some exploration is inevitable.”

The result is that by using less data at a fraction of the cost of current services, DeepSeek created a revolutionary model that triggered a tsunami in tech stocks and propelled a wave of new questions and decisions for companies, governments and citizens across the world. The famous statement by Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to set foot on the moon in July 1969, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” can be used for the Chinese disruptive innovations as well. In the year of the snake, which symbolizes new growth, there seems to be a new script being written across the world.

This “Sputnik moment” also shows a paradigm shift. And the story doesn’t end there. Players in other countries will continue to make contributions, and they will be about exploring avenues of collaboration to fight climate change, global health issues, and trade disagreements in the smartest possible ways. With new tools at hand, now we need more concerted international will.

Augusto Soto is director of the Spain-based Dialogue with China Project and a former expert at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.