DeepSeek AI Miracle

One of our teammates hails from Taiwan. When we needed to open a US company, she called a cousin she had never met to handle the paperwork and the banking. He was honor-bound to fulfill any reasonable request. Within a few days he had provided everything we needed to comply with legal and banking issues.

 

Later we conducted a project in Australia. Our venture required a citizen of that country to handle essential business requirement. Our Asian teammate reached out to another cousin she had never met who happened to live in Melbourne. He cleared the path for us within a few hours. The subject of fees never came up. By extension, we were family.

 

The essential element behind the Chinese DeepSeek AI breakthrough is more cultural than technical. Profound collaboration arises from an ancient familial social system based on ancient cultural norms often attributed to Confucius. Chinese culture requires family and friends to cooperate. 

 

The benefits of close family systems drives incredible productivity. China currently controls 80% of the solar power in the world. Chinese energy firms are poised to transform deserts into energy sources more prolific than wind, hydro, nuclear, and petroleum combined. 

 

China created DeepSeek AI almost accidentally out of a larger project for the incredibly low cost of $6m. Upon its release, global AI giant Nvidia lost roughly $600b in a single day. US and EU firms have been investing trillions of dollars in research and development on artificial intelligence projects, only to be overtaken in a flash. 

 

To put the Asian AI explosion into perspective, lets use time as a metaphor for money. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is just over 32 years. Big difference. By that metric the Chinese innovation came about in around 66 days. Upon its release, AI giant Nvidia shrank by more than a metaphorical 192 years—more than 70,000 days. Within days Wall Street hemorrhaged twice that amount in its greatest drop of a single stock since the Great Depression.

 

I have questions:  Where is the EU in this dynamic technology revolution? Why can’t Europe develop software company SAP into a global tech giant? How did European automakers lose the trust of their markets and fall behind worldwide? When will Germany emerge from its innovation slump to disrupt the global economy? The answer to these questions might surprise you, and offer a way for Europe to re-emerge as the cradle of innovation. 

 

Building a new culture is more important than throwing money at the problem. I agree with Joseph Schumpeter and  Peter Drucker, that innovative entrepreneurship is the way forward. 

 

For Europe to restore its leadership with regard to innovative entrepreneurship EU firms must develop a new generation of leaders who will create a highly cooperative model for learning organizations. When they are ready, our international innovation specialists can show them how.