From Jaipur to DeepSeek: The Call for Open Source and a Human AI Project
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From Jaipur to DeepSeek: The Call for Open Source and a Human AI Project
A few weeks ago, I attended the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in India. Called the “greatest literary show on Earth,” this annual gathering of famous authors and thinkers was founded in 2006 by British author and historian William Dalrymple.
During the panel titled, “From the Ruins of Empire,” the pin dropped. The JLF website introduced the panel as such:
“The legacy of the British Empire reshaped the modern world, leaving a trail of upheaval, resistance, and transformation. Pankaj Mishra, Jane Ohlmeyer, Christopher de Bellaigue, and Stephen R. Platt join Anita Anand to explore how imperial domination fueled intellectual revolutions and political awakenings across Asia and beyond. Together they uncover the political and intellectual movements that challenged colonial power, drawing connections between the past and the influence of the empire on global politics, identity, and resistance movements today.”
They were about the new generative AI model, DeepSeek:
- How did we get there?
- How do we craft the best path possible for the future of AI?
- Why is open source key in AI development?
In this piece, I’ll be addressing all three questions.
How did we get there: a short history to understand DeepSeek’s reception
How does DeepSeek invite itself to a literature festival? What historical events let to its prominence, when arguably some of the breakthrough open source AI contributions that enabled its creation originated elsewhere, including those in France (Mistral AI, kyutai1 and the Meta FAIR Paris team who started it all with the Llama language model), the United Kingdom (Stability AI) and Germany (Black
Forest Labs)?
The answer is simple: a historically-rooted rivalry.
While European AI labs received accolades for their open source AI breakthroughs — especially as DeepMind went proprietary and OpenAI transformed into a for-profit entity — DeepSeek’s reception in Asia had a much deeper historical resonance.
For instance, an article in the Financial Times on June 11, 2024, highlighted the success of Mistral AI:
“Mensch said that Mistral had used a little more than 1,000 of the high-powered graphics processing units chips needed to train AI systems and spent just a couple of dozen millions of euros to build products that can rival those built using much bigger budgets by some of the richest companies in the world, including OpenAI, Google and Meta.”
Yet DeepSeek’s launch was met with an overdose of media coverage, and its reception at JLF showed something more profound than just a discussion on AI performance. Why did Indian writers and journalists at the event, many of whom are often at odds with or critical of China, suddenly feel a shared struggle against the dominance of American AI Corporations (AICs)?
The pride and enthusiasm for DeepSeek across Asia are deeply rooted in colonial history and more recent corporate remarks.
The historical context: AI as a modern struggle for self-reliance
For Stephen Platt, also on the JLF panel and author of the book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and The End of China’s Last Golden Age, China’s tech ambition cannot be dissociated from its historical scars.
For Chinese leadership over the years, the Opium Wars (1839–1860) exemplify how Britain’s superior military and technological leadership humiliated China, forced territorial concessions and cemented for them a legacy of foreign exploitations. This Century of Humiliation remains a driving force for China’s current drive for self-reliance strategy, its aggressive investment in AI, semiconductors and other critical technologies — in summary its determination to avoid dependence on Western technology going forward — a lesson stitched into national consciousness.
The reason Indian panelists relate is several fold. Like China, the East India Company is a dark part of Indian history. There is no better book than William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company to understand how the rise from a small trading company to a powerful force led to the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the denunciation of Western corporate greed. As this review by The Guardian puts it:
“Dalrymple steers his conclusion toward a resonant denunciation of corporate rapacity and the governments that enable it. This story needs to be told, he writes, because imperialism persists, yet it is not obviously apparent how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess.”
More recently, and during the JLF panel, British journalist Anita Anand brought up the infamous video of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman answering a question on the capacity of India and its talent to rival AICs:
“The way this works is we’re going to tell you, it’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models [and] you shouldn’t try. And it’s your job to try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless.”
Open source AI as a symbol of resistance
DeepSeek, and European labs before it, offered hope in the AI race. The way they chose to do so was by favoring open source.
Moreover, the DeepSeek R1 release needs to be understood within a deeply-entrenched institutionalized rivalry, with the United States in particular — one so deep that Europe is often not mentioned when it comes to discussing competition with US technology.
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