Keen On

A week is certainly a long time in tech. On last week’s That Was the Week roundup, Keith Teare and I were asking if Trump’s America was a tech oligarchy. This week is all about the so-called “Sputnik Moment” of DeepSeek, a relatively underfunded Chinese AI company which seems to have radically undercut the value of massively financed American AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. As Keith notes, however, while the commodification of AI through a Chinese startup like DeepSeek is probably inevitable, it doesn’t actually undermine the value of US startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. The real victims of DeepSeek, Keith warns, are big tech corps like Meta and Alphabet which are struggling to monetize AI. While nobody outside Silicon Valley will be shedding tears over the travails of Meta and Alphabet, I what we really need, I think, is some Sputnik thinking about wealth redistribution in our big tech age. And, as we discuss, that might come from a certain Bill Gates who, this week, called for a “robot tax” to