The Chinese startup DeepSeek briefly sent stock markets into a tailspin at the end of January. Adding to the mix are Elon Musk’s plans to acquire OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, potentially to safeguard his own new “world’s smartest” AI. The AI world is abuzz.

Hardly on the market and already banned: Italy and South Korea have recently prohibited the use of the AI model from the Chinese startup DeepSeek. Seoul cited insufficient data protection as the reason for the ban and demanded improvements that the Chinese startup has pledged to make. In Germany, initial reviews are underway in states like Rhineland-Palatinate. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) points out that DeepSeek, according to its own statements, records “keyboard input patterns or rhythms,” making such keyloggers “at least questionable for security-critical areas.”

AI Summit versus Stargate

Reports on this came just in time for an AI summit that France hosted in Paris in February. The primary goal was to steer the technology in an orderly direction after the new US administration scrapped some established AI rules in the United States.

The real surprise in Paris, however, was a commitment of 150 billion Euros for French data centers and related infrastructure. This can be seen as Europe’s response to the recently announced 500 billion dollar OpenAI Stargate project.

Musk vs. OpenAI and Altman

Meanwhile, American tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced his intention to unveil the “world’s smartest AI” with his company xAI, founded in 2023. Training the new AI model Grok 3 alone required 100,000 H100 chips from Nvidia in his “Gigafactory.” The plan is to double this number to 200,000 GPUs, for which xAI hopes to secure further billion-euro investments from Nvidia, AMD, and Blackrock, as reported in another heise article.

With this, Musk is increasingly positioning himself as a competitor to OpenAI. Although the current Tesla CEO co-founded the company, he has been at odds with CEO Sam Altman over the direction of the ChatGPT provider for some time. Musk had publicly criticized the company’s profit-oriented approach, which even briefly led to Altman’s dismissal in November 2023. Altman and his board have now rejected Musk’s takeover offer of 97.4 billion dollars for the non-profit arm of OpenAI.

Board member Bret Taylor described the move as an attempt to disrupt the competition for Musk’s AI startup xAI. Others, like Altman, see it as an effort to completely dismantle OpenAI and remove it from the equation altogether. As exciting as the technology itself, so too are the latest developments surrounding AI. For Europe, it will be crucial to try and keep up technologically in this frenzied race. The low development costs of DeepSeek, combined with the investment pledges made in Paris, offer hope, as do early European AI models like Teuken-7B.

Image source: Adobe Stock / Shuo

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