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The AI War Is Coming
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The Triad

The AI War Is Coming

China. It was always about China.

Jonathan V. Last's avatar
Jonathan V. Last
Jan 28, 2025
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(Composite / Photos: GettyImages)

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:

Screenshot of artist rending of Chinese barges with headline "China Suddenly Building Special Fleet of Barges Suitable for Taiwan Landing" from

We’ll get to the Chinese landing barges in a minute. But we have to start at the beginning, with ChatGPT.

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