Breakthroughs in AI are so common these days it is hard to separate the truly important from the merely incidental. But one recent development is worth paying particular attention to: the appearance of DeepSeek-V3, a new large-language model from China. Its significance has as much to do with trade as with technology.

I’ve played around with DeepSeek for several days, and it is one of the best LLMs of the dozens I have used over the last few years. It is fast, easy and has a free version. And while it is not the equal of the best US models for sophisticated or difficult questions, I would rate it in the top tier. That is consistent with the opinions of others, including testers.

There are several other notable things about DeepSeek. First, it comes from a hedge fund rather than a technology company (that said, these categories are probably in need of revision). Second, it was reportedly trained at very low cost, by some

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