DeepSeek is the wagon, Chat GPT the mantis. The Chinese are playing cowboys, and Americans are playing Indians. The roles have been reversed.
Something big is brewing, almost as big as Greenland, although that’s not where I’m going with this. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, has issued a desperate warning to internet users in the Financial Times. if Western countries don’t develop AI through open-source models they will be left behind. The warning comes after Chinese startup DeepSeek dampened Trump’s testosterone levels, astonishing the world with the launch of its R1, created using open source technology, and with advanced reasoning capabilities, at a cost of just $5.5 million, a tenth of Open AI’s price tag.
It turns out DeepSeek is not alone. Bytedance, Moonshot, Alibaba, 01.ai, Tencent and others are also working on open-source AI models, only DeepSeek has beaten them to it.
What they all have in common is that they’ve been forced to innovate rapidly to circumvent export restrictions on microchips imposed on the world by Washington. As a result they are creating models that are just as efficient but at ridiculously lower costs. Made in China, in the field of technology. A textbook example of the law of unintended consequences: attempts to limit Chinese tech companies’ access to the most advanced chips has proved an innovation over-stimulus, producing record-breaking results, much like dopping does.
In case you don’t know these companies, Bytedance is the founder of Tiktok; Moonshot AI has been recognized as one of the top AI startups in China, and in January 2025, it introduced Kimi 1.5, claiming it matches the performance of advanced models like GPT-4 in areas such as mathematics, programming, and multimodal reasoning. Alibaba China’s equivalent of Amazon, and Tencent is the world’s biggest gaming platform, finally, WeChat, is a better version of WhatsApp.
Trump’s ultra-protectionist America First measures bring to mind an ancient Chinese story as told in the Zhuangzi. King Wu, ruler of Chu, was inspecting his lands, when he saw a mantis raising its front legs in an attack position, facing off against an approaching wagon. Intrigued, the king asked his coachman to stop and watched as the little mantis, completely unaware of its own fragility, tried to block the vehicle’s progress.
King Wu was impressed by the mantis’s courage and determination, but he also understood the absurdity of its effort. This episode gave rise to the proverb “A mantis trying to stop a wagon” (táng bì dāng chē “螳臂当车“). Since then it has been used as a metaphor to describe situations in which someone attempts, naively or futilely, to stop or confront a much more powerful force.
Trying to stop the tide, imposing restrictions to prevent a country from pursuing its goals, might work with weaker nations. Today, China has sufficient know-how to reduce the technology gap with the West, and is doing so at light speed.
Something very big is brewing, and neither party is willing to stop, and the reason is… they’re being told to stop.
Originally published in El Comercio of Ecuador: Una mantis tratando de detener un carromato
