DeepSeek AI Is the Competition America Needs

The company’s success demonstrates the futility of the U.S. policy of subsidies and sanctions

By George Gilder. Excerpts:

"semiconductors are an example of the Jevons Paradox. William Stanley Jevons, a 19th-century British economist, discovered that when a resource is rendered more efficient, we use more of it, often so much more that total spending on the resource rises. When people used only fire for lighting, the world was a very dark place. Nobel laureate William Nordhaus has pointed out that as we progressed from candles to oil lamps to incandescent lights and now LEDs, the cost of lighting dropped by 99.97%, yet we buy more of it than ever.

Advancing at an even faster pace, the number of transistors a dollar buys has increased by several million percent in 70 years. At the same time, annual global spending on semiconductors has grown from less than a few hundred million dollars to nearly $700 billion. The cheaper computing became, the more it was demanded."

"wafer-scale integration, it obviates the usual data-center welter of chips and “chiplets” in plastic packages backed by snarls of wire and racks of computer servers. Instead, the new regime banishes chips and integrates the essence of an entire data center on a single 12-inch wafer. A wafer is a silicon slice that serves as the target for semiconductor lithography usually inscribing the design of thousands of separate chips. In wafer scale, by contrast, it is just one integral system."