Sputnik moment or aha moment? How turbocapitalism feeds off scientific progress

A giant leap that shook the world, a technological Pearl Harbor that humiliated the United States and forced it to react. That was the Sputnik moment of October 1957, when the Soviet Union put American families on edge with a beep-beep in space that flew over their heads for 22 days. Silicon Valley has compared that crisis to the achievement of the company DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot just as intelligent and cheaper than those developed in the U.S. The message was put out by Marc Andreessen, one of the techno-billionaires who have helped Donald Trump get to the presidency, and it has been picked up in numerous headlines and analyses by the world’s most influential media outlets.

Why sell that narrative? We know what the original Sputnik moment sparked: the entire U.S. industrial and financial machinery was put at the service of a single goal, to beat the Soviets in the space race. And that is what bro-oligarchs like Andreessen want from Trump for themselves: zero obstacles (the president has already struck down Biden’s regulations requiring monitoring of the risks of artificial intelligence) and lots of money (a lot has already been spent and if DeepSeek has shown anything, it is that truckloads of dollars are not the way forward). For what? To get richer. That is another big difference from the space race. In his legendary speech at Rice University, John F. Kennedy said something more than the legendary phrase: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He also said it was an opportunity to gain new knowledge and rights, to improve the education of children and the lives of people with medical technologies. In this way, an entire country was inspired and excited by this goal. Legend has it that on a visit to NASA’s space center, Kennedy asked a janitor what he was doing, and the janitor replied, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Signing his executive order on AI, Trump was a little less inspiring: “We’re going to make a lot of money for the country.” And when he says “the country”—as is now being demonstrated—he means the oligarchs who support him by blurring reality. I can’t imagine many janitors being thrilled if Microsoft beats DeepSeek or Amazon defeats Temu.

Or if Instagram takes down TikTok. It’s the other way around. On the street, the rhetoric of the two blocs has a limited scope, nothing comparable to the fear of the Soviet Union. Western internet users are quite happy to use DeepSeek or any other Chinese app, even if they are making their data available to Beijing. When TikTok was about to be shut down in the U.S., its millions of users joked about saying goodbye to their Chinese spy. And when it was blocked for a few hours, they moved en masse to another Chinese app, because Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms, however much he may suck up to Trump, are a thing that only old folks and boomers enjoy using. The Sputnik metaphor is intended to turn into something epic what is nothing more than a ruthless competition between companies at the forefront of turbo-capitalism’s latest gold rush: AI.

It’s funny to see how the Chinese DeepSeek has attracted fans for having shaken Wall Street for a couple of days, as if it were some kind of Asian Robin Hood. Its Chinese parent company is High-Flyer, a hedge fund that develops computer programs to make money more quickly by moving money on the stock exchanges. DeepSeek, furthermore, is not a Sputnik: it is a program similar to others that already exist, not a technological checkmate. It is simply more efficient and cheaper because, among other things, it has been built by vampirizing other models: Meta, which is open source (DeepSeek is not the only one), and OpenAI, which is now crying because it has been robbed, as they did with the entire internet when they were the bold aspirants and not the powerful champions they are now. Meanwhile, Elon Musk claims that DeepSeek is lying. Musk, who attacks Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Zuckerberg every night, now uses his shit-spreading fan to criticize the Chinese for being liars. The American AI industry is tearing its hair out on a daily basis, Sputnik spirit in its purest form.

The story of DeepSeek does have an inspiring side. If you read the paper that has caused the stir, in which they show the computational leap that made them more efficient, you will see that they talk about an aha moment. The machine decided to rethink a problem by re-evaluating its initial analysis, reaching “unexpected and sophisticated results.” “This moment is not only an aha moment for the model, but also for the researchers who were observing it,” say the young Chinese scientists who developed the machine in their paper. It is reminiscent of other powerful moments in the development of AI, such as the aha moment experienced by the engineers at Google and the University of Toronto who came up with the transformers (the architecture that led to ChatGPT) before setting up their own companies. Or DeepMind’s move 37 of its game against the world Go champion, so astonishing that it showed the superhuman capabilities of the AlphaGo machine.

DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis has recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using that machine, now AlphaFold, to advance knowledge of human biology, paving the way to cures for countless diseases. The latest Nobel Prize in Physics was won by the 77-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, as a pioneer of this entire AI revolution that we are enjoying and that will undoubtedly improve our lives. Hinton and Hassabis are scientific geniuses of our time, the kind who continue to think about the benefit of all, even if they end up being hired by the big tech companies, like all the elite in this field.

These days, a few words that Hinton said at a roundtable organized by the Nobel Prize winners before Christmas have gone viral on social media: “What will happen is that this huge increase in productivity will generate much more money for big business and the rich, and it will widen the gap between the rich and the people who lose their jobs. And as soon as that gap widens, fertile ground is created for fascism. It’s scary to think that we could be at a point where we’re just making things worse.”

Humanity has nothing to gain from the battle between American and Chinese turbo-capitalism over who will make a killing with AI. Between this fake Sputnik moment and the real aha moments of science, we must choose Hinton: those like him who understand algorithms and computers with the intention of improving the lives of all, but above all, with the human instinct to see something terrifying in greed, in the gap between rich and poor.

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