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Vol. 12 No. 1 | 2025 Edition

Violet Geinger
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Deepseek: What it Means for Chinese and U.S. Companies’ Strategies in the AI Race

Louise Marie Hurel

AI models such as DeepSeek R1 can further stimulate AI innovation across the Indo-Pacific in at least two ways. First, the cost-effectiveness of DeepSeek’s R1 model training provides a benchmark against which companies in the region can further optimize and test at smaller scales through partnerships with U.S. and Chinese companies. Second, rather than being seen as national security threats, open weights models such as DeepSeek’s R1 can further stimulate innovation around other open models or innovative applications. Local and regional Large Language Models (LLMs) in Southeast Asian countries have been built on top of Big Tech LLM architectures. From 2020 to 2024, cross-regional and country-based initiatives in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand have released 35 LLMs, with 21 in 2024 alone. 

  

More importantly, rather than solely taking foreign technologies from China and the United States, countries in the region have sought to develop their own models as well. AI companies in the region have been harnessing the potential to develop models more sensitive to other languages and dialects. That is the case of homegrown indigenous LLMs such as AI Singapore’s SEA-LION, VinAI’s PhoGPT, Mesolitica’s MaLLaM, and India’s Sarvan AI.

This piece is offered in PDF format for easier reading. Download the PDF to read more. Download the PDF to read more.

Louise Marie Hurel is a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Cyber and Tech Programme, where her work focuses on cyber diplomacy, tech supply chain security, the political economy of private companies in cybersecurity, and cyber capacity building—particularly in Global South contexts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Data, Networks and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), within the Department of Media and Communications. In addition to her research, Louise is a Senior Associate Fellow at Virtual Routes and at the Brazilian Centre for International Relations (CEBRI). She brings over a decade of experience working at the intersection of technology, security, and geopolitics in think tank and academic environments as well as consulting for international organizations such as the United Nations.

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