Following the sudden emergence of China's AI model "Deepseek," questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the U.S.'s export controls on advanced semiconductors to China. This has led to growing concerns over the regulatory policies of the Trump administration.

According to a report by Metro Economy on the 29th, there has been ongoing debate about the effectiveness of the U.S. measures that have continued to impose export controls on AI semiconductors in an effort to both pressure China internationally and hinder the development of advanced AI technology.

On the 20th, Chinese AI startup Deepseek unveiled its AI model "Deepseek R1," announcing that it successfully developed the model in just two months at a cost that was only about one-tenth of the major U.S. big tech companies' AI systems. Additionally, Deepseek revealed that it used the lower-spec H800 AI semiconductor, rather than the high-end H100 from Nvidia.

Deepseek R1 is a large-scale language model (LLM) with 671 billion parameters, similar to ChatGPT. According to Deepseek, the model was trained over approximately two months at a cost of 5.58 million USD (approximately 80.68 billion KRW). The short development time and low cost are attributed to a new architecture designed for efficient learning and training. This architecture reportedly reduces the time required for LLM training to only 2.78 million GPU hours. The semiconductors used for development also had lower performance compared to those used by major big tech companies. Despite this, the model outperformed OpenAI's latest AI model, O1, by a narrow margin in the 2024 AIME (American Math Competition) benchmark. This development, which suggests that U.S. export restrictions might actually accelerate China's technological advancements, has raised concerns about the effectiveness of the U.S. policy towards China. In response, the U.S. government announced on the 13th (local time) that it would strengthen export controls on AI semiconductors and revise the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) to block circumvention, beginning a 120-day public consultation period.

The EAR (Export Administration Regulations) classifies countries' access to advanced AI semiconductors into three tiers, with China being designated as one of the 22 "adverse countries" and subject to the highest level of control.

Following the Deepseek incident, major IT figures in the U.S. have referred to the situation as a "Sputnik moment," raising questions about the effectiveness of the U.S.'s strategy to contain China. A "Sputnik moment" refers to the moment when a country with a technological advantage is shocked by the technological progress of a latecomer. CNN evaluated the situation, stating, "Considering that the U.S. has spent years restricting the supply of advanced AI semiconductors to China for security reasons, this outcome is extremely shocking."

Since 2022, under the Biden administration, the U.S. has begun regulating the export of major high-performance semiconductors from NVIDIA and AMD to China, citing concerns that China could potentially weaponize these semiconductors for AI development and training. This led to the halting of exports to China for NVIDIA's A100 and the next-generation model H100. The H100 is the highest-performance AI semiconductor used by companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google to develop AI models. The semiconductor used by Deepseek is the H800, a lower version of the H100.

While the U.S. sought to control technological advancements through semiconductor access regulations, the counterproductive effects have led to growing support for the stance of major semiconductor companies that opposed the EAR revisions. Following the announcement of the EAR amendments, major global IT companies have collectively protested, arguing that government overreach in regulating the export and import activities of businesses globally is problematic.

At the time, NVIDIA pointed out, "By manipulating market outcomes and suppressing competition, the U.S. risks wasting the technological advantages it has painstakingly gained." The company further criticized, "The U.S. wins through innovation, competition, and sharing technology with the world, not by retreating behind a wall of excessive government intervention."

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