Panic in Silicon Valley? China's DeepSeek challenges US supremacy over AI • FRANCE 24 English

what a difference one week makes on his first full day back in power Donald Trump trumpeting a $500 billion plan to build giant data centers for artificial intelligence the photo op last week put the rest of the world on notice the billionaire Tech Bros of Silicon Valley reign supreme with the full weight of the White House behind them fast forward to this Monday and the record $590 billion drop in the market value of us chipmaker Nvidia spooking the markets the announcement that a Chinese startup can operate its latest AI model for 18 times cheaper than

Sam alman's chat GPT 4 is deep seek for real why the sudden surprise if it upends America's dominance of artificial intelligence does that mean a democratization of Global Information Systems or a showdown between superpowers that ultimately decides well nothing less than who rules the world today in the France 24 debate is there panic in Silicon Valley with us he's chocked up the air miles to China over the years Andre loo Petri chair of the joint European disruptive initiative uh working on European Tech thanks for being with us thank you FR nice hat you're wearing yes

that's about Europe getting bold again okay we need this we'll see if your call is heard Tech entrepreneur Terry cre is the founder of the cybernetica Think Tank welcome back to the show thank you uh he's uh hung his hat in California but has returned to Ukraine yaroslav auk founder and CEO of the fourth law a startup that develops uh well autonomy for uh robotics thanks thanks for joining us and it has civilian defense applications both mostly defense these days we're in Ukraine we have to prioritize that but thanks for having me welcome to the

show and welcome to Paris France 24 is Peter O'Brien of tech 24 Fame is here with with us to sort the wheat from the chaff how are you fine thanks Fame is putting it bit strongly but uh I do appreciate it okay by the way it's still January and you can still make it your New Year's resolution to listen like And subscribe to the podcast version of the France 24 debate yeah it's the Trump backing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mark andreon who tweeted on Sunday how this was deep seek one deep seek R1 is AI

Sputnik moment uh a nod to 1957 when the Soviets stunned the world with their first satellite launch no one had expected at the time and it upended the belief that the West's Space Race dominance knew no rival for the financial times quote a little known Chinese hedge fund has thrown a grenade into the world of artificial intelligence and uh by the time the gavl went down on Monday trading over on Wall Street Tech Giants had indeed been rocked to their core Morgan a has the story as a new Chinese AI assistant sent shock waves through

the tech world the US president Donald Trump welcomed the Breakthrough but urged us companies to do more the release of deep seek AI from a Chinese company should be a wakeup call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win because we have the greatest science in the world even Chinese leadership told me that deep se's latest model is a lot cheaper and uses less computing power than other AI models the chatbot launched onto the global stage shortly after president Trump announced $500 billion do of private investment into AI infrastructure

including huge data centers with export bands on us semiconductor technology to China the startup said it built a product comparable to chat GPT with less powerful chips AI is not different from any other technology or even manufacturing processes uh that uh China had become very successful despite limited resources in the beginning so they have been proving themselves to be able to come up with great Solutions uh because of either Innovation or even if you say cutting Corners the biggest casualty of deep seek success was Nvidia nearly $600 billion do with was wiped off the chip

Designers Market valuation the biggest drop ever for a US Company by training the AI using fewer Ander quality chips deep Seek upends many assumptions about the future of the technology yeah Peter O'Brien uh uh this hitting people like a ton of bricks uh uh over in the United States first off is deep seek for real it's absolutely for real I'm I'm sure we've all around the table had a little play with it in the last few days to despite the Privacy statement on it um yes and it does it I mean just from a from

a complete non AI expert point of view it seems to be as performant on a lot of tasks as uh the latest models by open AI um okay we've also seen that you can't ask it certain questions about sensitive topics in China we'll get back to that sure we'll come to that but of course it's it is uh performing on many benchmarks at a similar level to the top models that are out there and that includes for a specific reasoning model which is R1 um close named to chat gbt o1 which is chat gbt's reasoning

model this is the um these actually think through problems before they provide the answer to you and what's unique with deep seek is that actually shows you how it's thinking through the problem before giving you the answer so it is Frank it's not hanging on to the secret sauce it's making it open to everyone yes um I'm assuming you mean by making its weights open yeah that's that's right um that's one of the powers of this is that any other company is now going to be able to deploy this and use it and I think

that's actually one of the reasons that a lot of the tech companies that yes you said uh were routed in that opening day of trading this week are now recovering a bit because for a lot of them they're going to be able to put this to good use as well yeah it's the last time we were discussing artificial intelligence onry we were talking about the two key ingredients uh you need a lot of data and you need a lot of energy is that model thrown on its head now maybe you don't need to uh suck

up all the oil that's in the ground to be able to power your your computer mod well data and energy getting together into to compute and yes I mean what has really turned on its head is this assumption that you need much more computing power to achieve better models and this is this is really the stunning and the sputnic did it surprise you well the fact that there will be a Black Swan that there is a capacity to reshuffle the card is at the core of what we do for a long time which is to

say it makes zero sense especially for the Europeans who are laggers on that to try to catch up but we need always to invent the next big thing and here it's the Chinese who're inventing the next big thing which is a reasoning model which uses a fraction on of the of the computing power that uh that for example open AI or entropic uh uses and that is actually a very good news for for everybody that means the race is still open that's why so much value has been wiped off the question is uh who will

make the best use of it the fact that also deep seeks model is open source is actually um old politics apart rather a blessing for for the world yav is is this good news for the fourth law for your company well I I think this very important news for the whole industry and I I think you know previously is it good news I'm I'm not sure yet um previously we were thinking that you know data compute and algorithms are the three most important driving forces between sort of general purpose AI generative models and this was

a breakr through in algorithms if anything still applying more compute on it you you're you're capable of of getting even better results but what that means practically I think two very important uh aspects of this first um we we all are talking that this is a Chinese model it's developed by Chinese however since it is open source it is now model for anyone for North Koreans for ukrainians for the Russians so we got to think about that in that way um and the second very important aspect and look I'm dealing with defense technology right we're

making drones equipped with AI by equipping any fpv drone with AI so it can uh do its mission on a battlefield and Destroy Russian invading forces on Ukrainian land so um this model is requires so little compute that you can just run it on a regular magbo computer so what that means is that now you can basically put this model onto any kind of well almost any kind of drone with just couple thousands dollars worth of equipment so could it be a game changer on the battlefield not immediately but over the long term we're seeing

a whole lot of different factors not necessarily these generative complex AI models but also techniques like computer vision and reinforcement learning for control which allow robots to be fully autonomous and full autonomy increases the capabilities of these very massively used fpv drones by about a factor of 10,000 times so fpv drones which are already causing about 60 to 80% of all the casualties on Battlefield replacing artillery the God of War they are about to become about 10,000 times more potent on both sides and this is something that will be happening by the end of this

year uh implications of that are huge and again we get back to this issue of of less energy is is it better is bigger better uh following the Silicon Valley model demand for cheap energy so high that Microsoft partner of chat GPT as a parent company last September announced the reopening of the threemile island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania it's the scene in 1979 of the worst commercial nuclear accident uh in in US history that was last September T Kim we were told well this is the way it has to be because you need this

for AI were you surprised then are you more surprised now um I think just to follow up on what said I I said it's it's either a Sputnik moment where uh in reference to the fact that suddenly the US had definitely lost its it lost this Edge or it could be a Kalashnikov moment where basically as you said anyone can use a high-end technology embedded embargo proof but you can put and do what we call hybrid Warfare where you actually do disinformation cyber attacks Etc so it's true that uh this unleash is is quite quite

interesting in a way that is also um first of all about the the energy uh the problem with the US is that it's a 21st century industry built on a 19th century uh grid so you know since rean they only buil two nuclear plants the electricity grid is a problem according to Gardner in 2027 there's not enough power to to to to go so this is in some ways a very good news for people who want to push because the the building the energy is going to be harder you know building a nuclear plant is

way longer than actually building a data center uh so we'll um we'll see but if I just want to go back to what it actually means is that the model that has been in play it it's very funny because we did a similar play to to Google when I started my company Jolly cloud with basically the amount of budget they have for the lunch or their team we built the equivalent of what they were building within sorry the amount of budget they had for for a few Millions we built something that spent billions out and

the reason we did that is we had a very small and focused team and exactly the same way as uh as what happened with Ds instead of using the state-of-the-art chip that was expensive we decided to to try to use a very small chip nobody wanted and and we made it work and suddenly it was a game changer in our industry we got hammered after by Google who actually bought every chip in the world uh to prevent us from from keeping up but if you look at what's happening in in in in in China at

the moment uh they're using uh people are not paid that much maybe paid a tenth of what they paid in Silicon Valley they're using super uh last generation chip and they make it work I think um the US has been way too comfortable by spending too much money and also believing that if we do something we're going to build to make it a monopoly so no one else can come in and the best news out of deep seek beside the fact that it's very cheap and it open UPS for everyone to build and so what's

left of Donald Trump's $500 billion do announcement from last week well it can make it for five billion now maybe was it even going to be 500 billion in the first place you know or was that a bit of a marketing uh marketing play you know we don't even think there was we're not even sure there was a 100 billion let alone 500 you you probably heard that even Elon Musk actually questions the capacity of the three gentlemen that on the on the picture Mas son uh Larry Ellison and Arison and and Sam Alman to

actually Finance the 500 billion let's be also a little bit cautious what I don't hear a lot in this story is that CH the the the timing of this announcement this is hybrid Warfare seven days after Trump's inauguration this is absolutely not a coincidence you would do uh under you would like to undermine the power the big bet that the US president made on American power which is actually what he does since he has been elected and the fact that that 600 billion was wiped off from an and a trillion in total from NASDAQ is

a First Act of hybrid Warfare from the Chinese I don't think at all why because you think it's a bluff that it's disinformation no it's not it's not hybrid Warfare It's it is in the fact that the timing of the attack not nefarious well the timing of was strategic the timing was and it I mean it has attacked the US Financial system putting a lot in doubt of this incredible growth story for the past six years also and one point I want to stress we all hear I heard 18 times in your in your documentary

sometimes you hear 10 times some estimate it's actually Al only two or three times more efficient let's exactly see because we've heard a lot of Announcement by the Chinese that we're mixing reality and Promises so we are not 100% sure exactly of how much energy let me ask you let me ask you because in the in the US uh just for our viewers there's what's called The Magnificent Seven which are these huge tech companies I'll list them Apple Microsoft Amazon alphabet which is the parent company of Google meta parent company of Facebook Nvidia and Tesla

are the broadcom now is also a now it's called the Batman because it it added a new billion dollar value trillion dollar value sounds like DC Comics but let me ask you then the the the the Sputnik moment in 1957 in the end it was the US that still landed a man on the moon the first is this going to play out the way Sputnik did yes there'll be competition but in the end the US will prevail I think it's probably the wrong even if if I use it is the wrong way to describe it

I think in 2004 Google announced how they built the infrastructure before to build anything on the internet you had to build this massive servers and this super expensive Oracle database and what they did they said we're going to buy computers off the shelf and create a grape of computers we that was the premise of what we call now the cloud and instead of having to spend millions in Hardware we're going to use very uh uh cheap device but you need the hardware we just talked about nuclear power plants but the the the question is which

Hardware do you you know in in in computer science the hardware goes always faster than the software and some people feel very comfortable it doesn't matter to optimize because something better bigger is going to happened and if if I need I'm going to go and see the investor and say I need 100 billions to do an an a data center the reality is if you take the time and if you don't have access to this device that's the the also the interesting thing is because of the Embargo most of the latest ships are not easily

accessible they are but now we see China building their own chips the they own competitors they are shipping a competitor to Nvidia to the University of Moscow they're doing their own uh um chips now for inference so the way you know when you ask a question so suddenly the economics of the of the US is is just playing more loow you know someone will do it cheaper and will take the time to do it cheaper in the US nobody had in mind the idea of making it cheaper so yaroslav auk is the lesson here that

the United States by sanctioning China by reducing the amount of sensitive Technologies it trades with it has it in fact helped it by forced this Innovation that t describes well first of all in the defense of of Donald Trump and um Folks at open AI I wouldn't be so skeptical about them actually investing $500 billion doll into this and saan adelan already confirmed that on his end and I think M masi son as well and Sam mman so I think they they do have funding secured um on on another side uh you know definitely uh

on on on on like on one hand it does signal to China that you know the business as usual is sort of over and China has to do more to rely on their own homegrown technology as it signals in fact to Europe that Europe has to rely more on its own homegrown technology you know we in Ukraine we sometimes think like we're living in this sequel to The don't look up movie okay so people they they they're they're so used to this sort of optimism and in intellectual dishonesty and everyone tries to think that somehow

everything is going to be all right okay and I think we should be freaking out everything is not going to be all right China is far ahead in AI compared to Europe the United States are far ahead so thanks God in France we have mistr but that's nearly not enough power we're going to talk about Mist in a moment because I I want to see how how that does but let's come back to a point that you alluded to and that you spoke about quite bluntly at the beginning of our show Peter what does artificial

intelligence made in China look like as Chinese State media released footage of deep seek founder langang Wen Fang deep in conversation with Chinese Premier Lee Kang I don't know if that's part of the hybrid Warfare there described by Andre uh Western media Outlets have been testing the Bots boundaries the guardian had to find workarounds using different coded letters to get straight answers to questions like what happened at tienan Square in 1989 the Reuters news agency asked who's iway way that's the outspoken and exiled disident Chinese artist and there you see uh what he have so

first it starts to answer you there you go nice big long answer quite accurate right and then suddenly something happens and you'll see in a second when he starts to move the mouse there on the screen he hasn't touched anything and woof sorry that's beyond my current scope let's talk about something else they tried the same thing on questions on things like Taiwan so just because that's what's happening now if this is open source Peter O'Brien can't uh we in the west uh correct that yeah that's a really interesting question because it appears to be

a a hardcoded just censorship of a few key topics um and we've actually seen this um funnily enough with open AI but when it comes to certain individuals who are um I can't remember their names now but there are various privacy researchers and activists and there was a sto a news story a few weeks ago that we talked about which was some of these names would just cause chat GPT to stop responding and we don't really know why but we assume this you know at some point in the company someone will um oh either have

a free count say we need to make sure these names don't appear um in case they you know pull up information that those people have perhaps published and they they don't want to have a a law suit over in this case it's very early days I've not seen anything so far as to if anyone's been able to pull up the um the weights and see if there are specific things that have been censored in the weights I don't think that we found anything on that in any case to to remind uh our viewers that it's

technically not open source because you can't see all the data that it's been trained on but it's open weights which means you can see the parameters that it's been set to so there's always sense there's always there's always somebody controlling something to well what's interesting is you have the deeps model and the Deep seek method uh the deeps model it's a Chinese model there's a new one that came out uh just today so uh uh there's going to be tons of them but it's a little bit scary but the Deep seek model is a big

questioning for my countries like France I mean you mentioned M you mentioned the vision of of AI one of the question is um the engineers of deep seek were paid tenth of what they paid in Silicon Valley by using second generation of chips even if they had a few new ones I I believe we have similar uh budget and similar quality of people uh I think the question is do we buil to copy the gigantism of Silicon Valley and building unbuildable uh models or do we create smaller different approach and I think yeah that's that's

an essential question because it's the question which is spooking us here in Europe more what's happening in China or those images of all those Tech Titans in the front row last week at the inauguration uh in they were sitting in front of elected officials they were sitting in front of foreign dignitaries at Donald Trump's inauguration last week that sets the tone uh the 32-year-old boss of French startup mistal took aim at Silicon Valley later last week in a panel discussion at Davos I think we need to make sure that uh the the AI we're building

the Industrial Revolution that we're all Building Together doesn't end up being controlled by free us players because if if that's the case the digital divide that we've been observing is just going to uh to continue to grow Andre Lo patri again uh I I don't know what he would say today after this uh deep seek announcement but would he be saying it's a good thing that it's not those three three Giants from the United States I think we need to leave AR mench talking he's an exceptional scientist but I would question a lot of the

strategy I mean what we are basically seeing today is that we are in a century of strategy the Chinese have a strategy is to you know to optimize under constraint and by the way it should be a lesson for the US they already had the lesson once with huawe they banned Huawei two years two three years later Hua Huawei developed the chip and an OS that everybody thought it would be impossible now they have their own mobile phones independent which means NSA cannot listen anymore but that's another point and here the the French have been

so obsessed I call that the Stockholm syndrome by doing as the big us Giants Stockholm being we we love to hate them we see that what arur uh and on the other side you will see at the AI Summit you will see first row at the Elis you will see all the big Tech Giants from the this is coming up in just a few days time just in a few days time so I think we need to begin to have our own strategy but isn't this this company Mist which you know paints itself as having

a sh string budget compared to the Americans I mean it raised half a billion so that's not little money uh it's apparently much more than what deep seek uh looked for it's much less than open AI which raised I think 6 billion if I'm not mistaken but I I think we are in the same kind of model High compute how much gpus so the the most advanced chips from Nvidia can you buy and here we see that the other thing that failed from the US is the export control the chips that the the the H1

800 on which deep seek trained are actually authorized since the export control of the US in 2022 so another so the lower qualities the yeah lower quality I mean not the most advanced last point that I think is not at all in the debate are we also seeing the life insurance of Taiwan that just disappeared I think that is for me the biggest worrying thing of that whole story that if the most advanced gpus are not anymore needed the fact that the Taiwanese kept very close and always avoided to put the latest nodes I mean

the most advanced ships to Arizona or to Dresden where they're buying a a chip factory in Europe because they wanted to preserve that kind of critical infrastructure in the that suddenly maybe gone too and that is very worrying from a geopolitical point of view obviously the all bets are off I think should Taiwan worry um they should always worry but um the the question I just want to go back to the Mist tral I think there's uh three things we can see through this first of all in France if you don't do poly technique or

normal soup which are these the the top Elite School top Elite engineering schools don't come out of Google or meta don't forget the founders come from Google and meta they were working on Lama before so they have this you know expensive uh I would say lifestyle of of of budgets um you cannot do anything and the reality is the people from deeps come from neither of these institution and they did really well and that means that there's a large pool of talent in France that is untapped because we have a form of elitism the second

thing is the problem of M trial is not the technology that they have no product deeps is number one on the App Store in America I want to repeat deeps is number one in app store in America it's unbelievable yday as I know if it's gone up to first place it was number two in France number two France yeah the question is if you have a technology and a savare uh and that's the value of the company if someone come with a better sare your value is zero if you have a product your value is

the product I still use CH GPT I end to use G CH gp2 because I believe it's it's a great product and it won't disappear and that's the problem in in France we are very much in the conceptual thing and the last thing is we have a chip manufacturing uh industry in Europe that should be able to do what Huawei and all his companies are doing where are this you talked about strategy you're absolutely right there's no vision nobody in Europe believes that we can build the chips for uh the inference you know the the

non intensive part of the AI but we should and uh we should have done that five 10 years ago so yav auk what advice would you give the a company like mistal yeah well I'm not sure I'm I'm clearly in position to to give that advice but but I have give us the some some thoughts some some higher level thoughts on advice uh to Europe as a whole and to Western civilization as a whole you know well first uh our our autonomous fpv drones you know the Drone costs about half a thousand dollars and it

can do work of a javlin or nasams which take down a main battle tank and Javin would usually cost you $100,000 and a main battle tank cost you about you know 2 to five million if it's Russian and $20 million or Euros if it's uh if it's European so that gives you very asymmetric Advantage but then AI systems that are being run on these fpv drones they run on extremely inexpensive compute less than $100 worth of compute even less than that so that is something to notice it is not always about the strength of the

computer it is about the the product thinking how you can apply it and that is what deep seek demon so what is so what does Europe do to develop that F that favorite catchphrase of Emanuel Macon strategic autonomy so so I I would not I would not agree that Europe doesn't have a plan the plan was presented by Mario dragi that's a plan of if I'm not mistaken at 8800 billion euros or something like that and that's a plan not how we win it's a plan how we catch up with China and the United States

of America in our technological development the problem is much deeper than just the AI it is the problem that Europe falls behind in all the technology and as president zalinsky said at his D speech he said first we fall behind in technology then we fall behind in economy and then we fall behind politically so we really that's why I'm saying we should be freaking out and to be successful we got to be United because you know there is this old saying China has more smart kids than we have kids okay so if if France if

stries to develop its own model and the United States its own and Ukraine its own and Germany its own there is no way we win China has the economy China has the industry they have the chips and they have the smart people who invent algorithms and so on so we can only do this together but at the same time obviously to what the colleagues said every artificial intelligence model will have its own view of the world so there has to be many sovereign models and you know French model will have its own French values and

principles embedded which are maybe different from the American ones maybe different from s Saudi Arabia and maybe different from North Korea but will it be different from Germany Italy and uh the Netherlands for instance well that is a question but what has to be U sort of uh done together is the development of these models so it is quite possible for the United States France Germany Great Britain to come together working on these models because because they have uh you know Common Western values at their core and you know one way or or another I'm

pretty sure this happens hopefully this doesn't happen the bad way hopefully we don't need you know another crazy moment for that you know they say uh the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a wake up moment for Europe but uh wake up call but uh hearing a wake up call doesn't doesn't necessarily mean getting out of the bed right so if anything Donald Trump election in America is another way cup call and deep seek is another wake cup call so there's another election that's happening next month in Germany Andre Petri you heard there yav uh mentioning

that report by the former president of the European Central Bank Mario dragi calling for reindustrialization is that a Hot Topic on the campaign Trail it is a yes but what is happening right now in Brussels that everybody tells you we are agreeing 90% with the Mario drag report the problem is every European country has a different idea of what the remaining 10% are good case I mean I'm half German and my German friends currently are refusing to have a bank take over by an Italian bank so this is a first case in point that they

want Europe as soon as it does not infringe the German the the German banking system the same thing with the French the French talk about European sovereignity but then the only thing we promote is the the French Champions as long as we have this narrow-minded not strategic view I think we are doomed and last but not least Trump was elected 20th of January deep seek is coming out I mean we talk about it on 24th of January we are talking in days tomorrow the president of the commission will announce a competitivness compass which is the

implementation of the marid dragi what will she say we will plan for action plans in 26 and 27 I think Europe has it totally wrong in terms of agility speed and boldness how fast can you go in you're 27 I think that the matter is not about the country it's about the people I think uh the question of the investment it's not how much to create companies you don't need a lot of money you need to actually give the money to the right people and we don't know how to do that the regulation make it

harder for the right people to get the money we don't we invest in people who go fast that's why Silicon Valley is so good they're the only one to understand true Talent that's why a lot of people are actually leaving Europe to go to the US not because they want to leave the US it's because for the first time they talk to people who value their talent we have a massive problem the elite is completely disconnected from technology they believe technology is an industry you put some money in this place and five years later we'll

have a champion it doesn't work like that and I think in a way the what happened with M trial and with deep seek is that in France we said oh we have such great kids and they're super smart and we're going to put put money and in a few years we'll have a champion and suddenly what we see is people in China are hungry for technology all around what I see in Ukraine is the Forefront of what the world will be it's a digital Warfare they out of necessity they had to be so much invent

so much invention a friend of mine in Ukraine told me if we had to wait for approval from NATO uh the the app would never be we did it in a few weeks now the the rate of innovation correct me if I'm wrong is about weeks it's it's it's come to a point where uh we're not even in a race you said we didn't come out of bed it's we're doing a race and we're still debating if we should stay another hour in the bed or just go slowly back to the to the to the

the running case I it's really depressing some if I can be a bit even more precise I would not have an anti-elite discourse because I think that's a bit dangerous and you have a lot of people from poly technique who are doing very well in the Silicon Valley I think the question is not about the elite schools or not is about the fact that we have in France in Europe a pick the winner mentality which is done from the bureaucracy what we need is to reinvent the sense of purpose what do we want to achieve

and then leave the best people make them make their way up the problem is is that we have the Ministry of Finance who is currently deciding whom to give the money and unfortunately in Europe it's not the best anymore who go to politics we can see that everywhere in Europe yes public publicly uh driven before we go go I was a little bit haunted by something that yaroslav said earlier about uh fully autonomous models on both sides of the battlefield it's I'm sorry it's an Old Chestnut because it's a question we ask every time we

talk about artificial intelligence but uh does Humanity know what it's doing absolutely absolutely um and uh Humanity you know that there is one side of humanity that wants to you know conquer build an Empire uh subdue other nations and so on and there is other side of humanity which wants to be free and therefore there is struggle um there is no version of Talk future full autonomous models yes uh you know it's AO it's dystopian isn't it if they're it's happening it's going to happen by the already we have problems with the weo cars that

uh that have uh you know the self-driving cars that you know have a few funks in the system uh but that's nothing compared to what you're describing which is lethal weapons on the battlefield exactly well that that is what is already there and if you were there on the battlefield you would really want those weapons to be on your side because enemy surely uh deploys those weapons against you is fully autonomous a good thing absolutely that's a necessary thing for our future survival you know I live in Kev I have Russian drones bombing my city

every night I have friends who are fighting on the front lines and are dying uh you really want this kind of technology to protect you and there is no version in the future where that technology is not getting used because the enemies are using this against you and by the way you know uh Russian sort of Partners and allies are helping them way more than in a way uh than than uh the partners helping Ukraine you know they're s send sending their soldiers to to the they're sharing technology sharing Chad drones they gave uh the

nukes to the bellarus no one get gave nukes to Ukraine so all of that is happening already uh the only way for the West to Prevail is to develop an ecosystem which is much faster in creating Innovative and disrupting technology than the enemy and one last thing besides the robotic killer drones on the front lines we should maybe even more so be afraid of what is happening in the social media because the social media is really the weapon of mass destruction the social media is a weapon that can destroy societies and now with social media

and generative artificial intelligence you have the kambrian explosion of Lies you have informational viruses spreading influencing elections and if we do not respond and if we do not develop offensive information Warfare capabilities we will be in deep trouble Peter O'Brien um this is a a warning that's been sounded for years now yeah um how are we dealing with it well I think a lot of decision making is being influenced by um by AI Safety Research is red worldwide and one of their uh key concerns is definitely autonomous weapons um I'm not going to sit here

and being moral Arbiter on what's right and not that's absolutely not my job but what about on the disinformation side disformation have we got a better handle on it do we know how to control it um I think I think you've got different things going on in different parts of the world so so I think in the US obviously um under under Trump we do have uh huge changes happening to meta platforms um on platforms like Twitter uh and and what's going to be interesting is seeing what's going to happen in in terms of enforcement

over EU rules in the next few years and how these new policies that are being handed down by uh American uh social media Giants how the EU is going to respond to that well on that one I I want to remind uh our viewers that the people who are in charge of enforcing the famous Digital Services act are 35 people of which 20 are Economist based in civilia so good luck for them so I think we should also not fool ourself on our capacity to react second thing I think we should not be ideological on

on meta for example it's not clear if fact checking by humans or c community notes powered by technology is actually better or not so I think again we need a little bit of strategy today those who are really ideological are often the the Europeans and last but not least I mean look at how China again used I mean China Chinese companies working as a as an ecosystem took the decision to refuse probably tens of billions of dollars for the Tik Tok platform and prefer to take it down rather than to have us investors M court

on the on the good side of the force and probably musk on the less good side on the force take it over and adapt it to a to a US model so they prefer to take it down because they realized the weapon was not anymore uh uh accepted so I think social media you're totally right for the Europeans there is clearly a moonshot on can we assess the impact of this information can we understand why such an echo chamber happens I mean there are some very clear topics where Europe could be back in the race

and I I'm I'm just very very uh uh you know annoyed that policy makers but also investors don't see that it's the way forward just sorry to bring it to deep deep seek very quickly European a European company could have done that there was nothing stopping mistra from doing the innovations that deep seek did on the budget they had I just wanted to make that very clear so we can talk about policy makers we can talk about but they prefer to buy 50% of H1 100 and then spend half of their 500 million the the

CEO and co-founder of germani startup Alf Alpha takes a more relaxed attitude to deep seek uh quoted by the website sifted uh yonas andris stating uh don't get me wrong a great model but meta's llama 4 will also be great and in 12 months both will be obsolete cream we'll see if there's a new cycle um I think what we just go back to what you said is we're living in um hybrid Warfare it means that uh every infrastructure in the world has been hacked the US has been hacked potentially a trump phone mobile phone

was hacked with the um Soul typhoon hack uh announced this uh this summer we know that disinformation and is basically designed for cheap now cheaper with deep seek and we're entering a new age what we can sometime Calla epistemic Warfare where basically you're using AI to just change the culture in some way that's what Tik Tok did it it liquefied our brains with like 50 seconds videos the inability for a young generation to focus but and by the way Tik Tok in China is different it's totally different but the point is that so it's changed

France for instance I think so it Chang everywhere the West there papers showing that it's reducing by a couple of IQ points of people using it it is hybrid Warfare too it and but the problem is we are at War there's two things that happen at the same time there's the digitalization of the war what you actually live every day on the battlefield and the militarization of the internet we are at War and a lot of a lot of people do not understand that on one side you have to do the economics growth of the

internet and the French Tech and everything it looks good but in the same time we live we do that within a battlefield and the problem of you talked about autonomous uh I'm haunted by autonomous uh uh it's going to happen one day one country I don't know where how so desperate will actually make it happen and the problem with autonomous Warfare is that it's not like a nuclear warfare it's not like the total end of the world it is just a new way and whoever opened that Pandora box we will have some some deep trouble

and the the question for Europe is we do not see ourself in this world where we are at War and in the same time we're doing business with people that we are at war with and uh as you said earlier it's not it's about we we need to have people our hands on and we need to have less uh people who have a very unpragmatic ways of solving problem more hands oniq just to make it clear partial autonomy is already happening and full autonomy will happen by the end of this year by the end of

this year well thank you for helping us to stay awake at night y love you should with those happy thoughts I want to think as well Andre Liz Petry T cream Peter O'Brien thank you for being with us here in the France 24 debate [Music]