Scale AI CEO says China has quickly caught up to US with DeepSeek

The United States may have led China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day everything changed.

Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Goalsaid on Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos that DeepSeek, China’s leading AI lab, launched a “momentous model” on Christmas Day, and then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek o1 , which competes with OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.

“What we have found is that DeepSeek…has the best performance, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Wang said.

In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the AI ​​race between the United States and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has much more NVIDIA H100 GPUs (AI chips that are widely used to build powerful and leading AI models) than people may think, especially considering US export controls.

Wang also said he believes the AI ​​sector will reach $1 trillion, on par with estimates that the generative AI market is poised to grow. Top $1 billion in income in a decade.

“The United States is going to need a huge amount of computing capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding: “We need to unleash American energy to enable this AI boom.”

Earlier this week, Trump announced a joint venture with Open AI, Oracle and banksoft invest billions of dollars in US AI infrastructure. The project, Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and CEO from OpenAI, Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners will include microsoft, NVIDIA and Oracle, as well as the semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

In the interview Thursday, Wang said he believes it will take two to four years to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a widely cited but vaguely defined benchmark used in the AI ​​industry to denote a branch of AI that seeks technology that matches or surpasses human intellect in a wide range of tasks. The AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we are close to achieving it and others saying it is not possible at all. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful artificial intelligence systems that can use a computer just like you or I could… and basically be a remote worker in the most capable way.”

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, ramped up its technology development over the past year, and in October, the startup saying that their AI agents were able to use computers like humans do to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s computer-enabled capabilities allow its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and Internet browsing in real time, he said. the startup.

The tool can “use computers basically the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can perform tasks with “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”

Open AI supposedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

When asked which US AI startups are leading the AI ​​race right now, Wang said each model has its own strengths; For example, OpenAI models are great for reasoning, while Anthropic’s are great for coding.

“The space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.