China's DeepSeek Moment — a talk given April 17 2025 at Carnegie Mellon

Hey cynical listeners. So I was traveling a little last week and the podcast guest that I had lined up during that travel time actually fell through. And so what I've got for you this week is a talk that I gave in April at Carnegie Mellon University. And for people who have been following this show or have heard my talks before, there will be some stuff you've heard before.

And uh if you had a chance to listen to my appearance on odd lots, a lot of that actually uh kind of came from some of the thinking that I I did while prepping for this talk. But here we go. It was really about the deep seek moment. That was the the the name of the talk anyway, China's Deep Seek moment. And it's really about, well, I'll I'll jump right in and you'll see.

How many times do we have to be shocked by China's technological achievements before we finally stop being shocked? This latest trade war we now find ourselves in has focused American attention once again on China, and once again we are seeing across broad swathes of American society a sense of astonishment, of disbelief, of, well, shock. and in some quarters a disquieting reckoning with uncomfortable truths about relative power between the US and China, especially regarding technological power. More and more Americans are coming to grips with the reality that China isn't just a low cost manufacturer of shoddy low tech goods, leveraging cheap and plentiful labor to make socks, toys, and Christmas ornaments, but rather a global hub of advanced manufacturing that's churning out the best electric vehicles, the most feature packed smartphones, the most amazing and affordable humanoid robots, and drones, and some highly disruptive AI large language models to boot?

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