Forces beneath the heavens: another Chinese neural network will hit Trump's AI empire

US-based IT companies are stepping up measures to build super-intelligent neural networks. According to President Donald Trump, the rapid development of AI in China should be a wake-up call for US tech corporations. In parallel, Microsoft is investigating the possible theft of OpenAI code to create DeepSeek, and Alibaba is unveiling its AI technology that performs PC and smartphone control tasks. How two centers of AI power entered the fight - in the material "Izvestia".

A new neural network from China

US President Donald Trump called the rapid development of AI in China a wake-up call for technology corporations and urged representatives of the IT industry to strengthen the relevant developments in his country.

According to experts, the Stargate project (a corporation made up of US technology leaders) and other companies had a hard time resisting such a solution as the universal AI tool DeepSeek. However, with the advent of Alibaba's Qwen2.5-VL neural network, the US' chances of creating the world's first super-intelligent AI have been drastically reduced. The Chinese company unveiled the new model on January 28.

- The strengthening of the PRC's position in the field of AI may undermine the US leadership in key sectors (e.g., cloud computing, autonomous systems, data analytics), as well as lead to a decline in the share of US companies in the global market of AI solutions, such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. A particularly strong blow for developers may be the fact that Chinese neural networks were originally customized to work within economic tasks, but they can be easily integrated into global supply chains, for example, through the Alibaba platform, which will increase the dependence on Chinese technology. In addition, the mass use of Chinese AI poses potential threats to U.S. national security interests," Igor Bederov, head of information and analytical research at T. Hunter Igor Bederov.

According to him, the Trump administration's response could be to impose sanctions against Alibaba and other Chinese companies similar to Huawei, as well as to limit the access of AI platforms to American data. In parallel, we should expect increased funding for US projects and the creation of significant benefits and privileges for them.

Both countries - China and the US - are moving towards the development of universal AI, aka AGI (artificial intelligence capable of self-learning independent conclusions), noted IT observer Sergey Pomortsev. Judging by the capabilities of Chinese scientists, they retain a chance to be the first to achieve this goal, he added.

- Trump's Stargate project already has a lot of internal problems, but the chain of actions, during which China established its own AI research fund and then launched DeepSeek and Qwen at a short interval, could have dramatic consequences for both the shares of American IT companies and their technologies, the expert said.

The Qwen2.5-VL family of models from Alibaba is able to perform a wide range of functions - analyze documents, extract data from charts and graphs, recognize fragments of movies and TV series, answer complex questions and solve mathematical problems. In addition, the development can perform PC and smartphone control functions, not inferior in its options to the virtual assistant OpenAI Operator, according to reviews of the new product.

- People invested hundreds of millions of dollars in ChatGPT and waited for it to magically change the whole world and bring billions. Instead, Chinese neural networks came along and were much cheaper to develop. The main impact of DeepSeek and its analogs on the shares of American AI tycoons comes down to the fact that this event deprives the US of a status close to a monopoly on advanced LLMs (large language models) and, consequently, breaks its current pricing policy," said Daria Stepchenkova, Director of Digital Transformation at INVITRO Group.

Information warfare in the creation of AI

According to Sergey Pomortsev, companies from the US and China have already joined the information war. China's XLab said that DeepSeek's work was suspended due to a series of large-scale cyberattacks. Most of the IP addresses from which the attacks originated are primarily linked to the US, but also Singapore, the Netherlands and Germany.

- They do not accuse Trump or Americans directly, but make it clear that the "wake-up call" has already become a wake-up call for intelligence agencies to destabilize the work processes of the popular AI model," the expert believes.

Igor Bederov agrees with him, noting that the situation with competition in AI is beginning to look more and more like an arms race during the Cold War.

Microsoft and OpenAI also suspect that DeepSeek did not just use the results of other language models, but engaged in data theft. An internal investigation has already been launched into the matter. According to several Bloomberg sources, a group of people associated with the DeepSeek startup may have illegally obtained classified data on Sam Altman's company's technology, and used it for their own purposes.

In case Microsoft proves the use of other people's data in the language model code from the PRC, the consequences for the Chinese IT industry will be dramatic, Igor Bederov believes.

- A year ago, absolutely everyone thought that the only leader in the field of generative models was the OpenAI company. It was indeed dominant by a huge margin. But now the situation is changing rapidly: DeepSeek is entering the arena. The company is not only catching up with the leader, but is also putting its developments into Open Source under a fully open license with the possibility of commercial use," said Alexei Gusakov, technical director of Yandex.

Investors on the stock market are concerned about the possibility of redistribution of shares in the field of AI, because if relatively small teams can compete with the techno-giants, the capitalization of the latter may shake, said Andrei Smirnov, head of Serverspace Corporation ITG.

- Politicians are afraid of increased risks associated with disinformation and manipulation of public opinion, because such tools are becoming more accessible and cheaper, which means they can be used in large-scale information campaigns," he said.

The launch of the Chinese startup DeepSeek earlier collapsed the shares of the largest IT companies in the United States and jeopardized the further effectiveness of the Stargate company, the creation of which was announced by Donald Trump. Cumulatively, securities collapsed by more than $1 trillion, an unprecedented drop for the industry.