Tomorrow Could Be Rough

Just a quick halftime warning.

Good evening:

Sitting at halftime, this NFL game is a mess. I don’t understand the rules of a catch, an interception, or what counts as a ball hitting the ground…

But I digress.

Just a quick update. Tomorrow could be rough. There are three major risks that have spilled out over the weekend.

The first is the report about a Chinese AI project called DeepSeek. Here’s Wired:

On January 20, DeepSeek, a relatively unknown AI research lab from China, released an open-source model that’s quickly become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley. According to a paper authored by the company, DeepSeek-R1 beats the industry’s leading models like OpenAI o1 on several math and reasoning benchmarks. In fact, on many metrics that matter—capability, cost, openness—DeepSeek is giving Western AI giants a run for their money.

DeepSeek’s success points to an unintended outcome of the tech cold war between the US and China. US export controls have severely curtailed the ability of Chinese tech firms to compete o…