Is this a Sputnik moment? The world has reacted with astonishment to the release of a disruptive AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek, which appears to be able to perform as well or, in some cases, better than ChatGPT and other cutting-edge models put out by U.S. companies. Americans had assumed their massive lead in funding, access to high-quality chips, and innovation would keep them well ahead. That assumption now looks like hubris.

DeepSeek is a private Chinese company that demonstrated its stunning prowess on the cheap in the most important technology for the future. It’s not exactly clear just how much DeepSeek’s model actually cost, to what extent it needed to use U.S. models for training, and whether there was any closet Chinese government help. But given the enormous efforts that the U.S. government has made over the last few years to preserve its advantage — chip bans, export controls, etc. — DeepSeek has made a remarkable achievement. It suggests to me two lessons and two questions.

The first lesson is that, over time, open artificial-intelligence systems are likely to outperform closed systems. Many have pointed out that DeepSeek used Meta’s open-source Llama model to train. It also used Qwen, a family of AI models, also open-source, put out by the Chinese technology giant Alibaba.

Second, constraints can be useful, as former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has noted. Just as art sometimes flourishes in repressive environments, in which restrictions force artists to be creative, so also engineers often operate best under constraints. Forced to use second-tier chips, Chinese engineers produced creative workarounds.

In a fascinating interview last year, Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of DeepSeek, argues that his engineers are more motivated by doing research than making money, and appears to contrast that attitude with the one prevalent in Silicon Valley, which is all about maximizing revenue, providing cloud services and generating cash flow.

The first question that DeepSeek raises is: Can the United States stop China from advancing along the technological frontier? Some argue that DeepSeek shows that export controls work: Its model needed many Nvidia chips, which it managed to procure before export bans were fully in place. Soon, China will not have access to the best chips and will suffer even more from the ban.

But as we have learned with the rounds and rounds of global sanctions against Russia, the world economy is large and porous. Stuff gets through. And China is not Russia.

It is a vast, technologically sophisticated economy with millions of software developers and hundreds of high-quality firms in the technology space. Human talent on that scale will find ways to innovate, even if those measures keep China slightly behind.

The second question: What is the cost of this approach? If technology bans and export controls at best keep China behind a year — maybe just several months — is that gain worth the cost? That cost is Chinese retaliation, limiting the United States’ access to key materials that it needs for high technology. More important, a decoupled global economy also creates a closed ecosystem in which U.S. technology companies will not face competition from the best. Is Tesla going to innovate at the highest level if it is not facing its strongest Chinese rival?

A technology decoupling means that AI will become the central part of a new global arms race, totally unregulated and unconstrained, with the world’s two largest economies hurtling toward superintelligence no-holds-barred, and incorporating it into all military applications — including nuclear weapons. If artificial intelligence is as revolutionary a technology as predicted, having it unleashed in every realm of human life with absolutely no guardrails points to a scary future — one far more dangerous than anything people imagined because of the Sputnik satellite.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.