1. DeepSeek
The tech and financial worlds lost their collective minds yesterday when news broke that a Chinese quant shop, DeepSeek, had suddenly taken the lead in the AI race.
There are a bunch of different plot lines here, but they’re really all about the same story: China’s bid to become the Pacific hegemon.
We’re going to range pretty far afield today—from chip manufacturing, to large language models, to tech stocks, to TikTok. But underneath everything I want you to keep one image fixed in your mind:
We’ll get to the Chinese landing barges in a minute. But we have to start at the beginning, with ChatGPT.