Durov explained why China developed AI so quickly

Tengrinews.kz - Telegram founder Pavel Durov, in light of the success of the Chinese AI model DeepSeek, called for radical reform of the secondary education system in the United States, according to RBC.
Otherwise, the dominance of China in technology will become inevitable, he stated.

"After the success of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, many are surprised at how quickly China has caught up with the U.S. in artificial intelligence. However, China’s progress in algorithmic efficiency didn’t appear out of nowhere. Chinese students have long been ahead of others in mathematics and programming in international Olympiads," Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.

According to him, the secondary education system in China surpasses the Western one: the country encourages intense competition among students, which he believes was borrowed from the Soviet model.
At the same time, most Western schools do not encourage competition, prohibiting the publication of students' grades and rankings.

"The reason is clear – to protect students from pressure or mockery. However, such measures also predictably demotivate the best students. Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin. Remove the losers, and you eliminate the winners," he pointed out.

DeepSeek is a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM) from the Chinese company of the same name, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a co-founder of the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer (the company is now fully owned by this fund).
The DeepSeek chatbot is capable of generating texts of varying lengths and genres, searching for information on the internet, interpreting charts and explaining images, writing code, formatting it correctly, and solving complex programming tasks in languages like C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, and more.
On January 20, the company released its first-generation models, R1-Zero and R1, based on DeepSeek-V3, to the public. By January 27, the app, built on these models, surpassed ChatGPT in the ranking of the most downloaded free apps on the App Store in the U.S.
DeepSeek claims to have spent $5.6 million on training one of its latest models, significantly less than what was required for the development of American models.
As a result of DeepSeek's success, shares of the American company NVIDIA, which produces chips for AI, plummeted by 17% in one day. It lost its title as the most valuable company in the world, overtaken by Apple and Microsoft. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, lost $21 billion. Other losses were also incurred by Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, Dell founder Michael Dell, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.