DeepSeek Is the Wake-Up Call Our AI Overlords Needed

The days when a news story out of the tech sector leads the entire day’s news cycle don’t happen as often as they used to. It almost makes me long for the chaotic bitcoin billionaire gold rush nonsense. But when a little Chinese AI company called DeepSeek takes a trillion-dollar chunk out of the U.S. stock market—in what can best be described as a nerd drive-by? Well—that story goes above the fold, to use a term my journalist friends love. Is it time to panic? Should you panic? Don’t panic. Unless you’re Sam Altman. Then you may want to check the cash reserves and ask everybody to work a couple of late nights. Because DeepSeek, the “little guy,” is coming for the lunches of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia… everyone. And it doesn’t stop there. No One Expected the Spanish Inquisition? No seriously, you’re fine. Just don’t look at your retirement account for a couple weeks. This is a gut check—and one that was long coming, because it accompanies any meteoric mainstream adoption of a new technology. Look, I kid. Sam Altman is never going to read my columns. And I don’t miss the bitcoin FOMO or Tom Brady hawking crypto or NFT bro billionaires. I don’t pine for the days of Yo or Klout or Napster or Flooz. Yeah, I threw Napster in there. I was right there with you, but stealing songs is stealing songs. But for real. In a 2025 dominated by Temu and Shein, no one imagined that a Chinese company might just drop in and deliver a just-as-good product for a fraction of the price? It looks like DeepSeek did just that. And I’m aware that in this same Year of Our Lord 2025, we should definitely wait for triplicate and quadruplicate verification on the veracity of those claims. But holy cow, it begs the question: Do you really need all that money and all of that hardware and power to build your super-cool chatbot? I mean, at this point, it looks like DeepSeek did not need all that—pending quadruplicate and maybe quintuplicate independent verification, which will likely never happen because China. But it begs a deeper question. The one currently keeping Sam and Dario and Sundar and Satya and especially poor Jensen up at night. Man, Jensen alone lost $20 billion in a day. Oh, here’s a link to a quick primer on the carnage if you need it. Then come back and I’ll ask the question out loud that we’re all asking internally. What Are We Doing Here? Or, more bluntly, “Is this AI shit real or what?” Or, with context, “Exactly where is this ‘future of AI’ that’s either always right around the corner or stuck just behind the AI wall?” I’ve been telling you what AI is and isn’t for a couple years now, because I started working with this science back in 2010. I’m no AI oracle (is Oracle into AI?), but I know enough to be able to connect the dots. AI is just a series of “if-this-then-that” (IFTTT) calculations—but really, really fast. Back in 2010, we could scare up enough processing power to make the output faster and slightly more elegant at scale than humans could imagine. And I mean that literally. That’s where IFTTT starts to look like magic. The processing capabilities that existed 15 years ago meant we were just scratching the surface. Well, that surface is now wide open and we’re approaching the core. But the core is still IFTTT. Only it’s so fast now, the machines can’t even comprehend it. And when you’re selling that into the mainstream, well, you’re gonna get hop-ons. You’re going to get companies that slash their workforces and invest in the promise of a future where machines can increase productivity at a pace that we “can’t imagine.” I saw a thread on Hacker News where some poor dope was having to justify to his or her leadership why AI hasn’t increased the productivity of their software development by 10x. Again, in 2025, this might be a troll. But it tracks. And more importantly, it’s laugh-to-keep-from-crying funny. Don’t Panic Look, it’s like Hans Gruber said when the cops showed up. This was inevitable, and, as it happens, necessary. This is going to force everyone involved to take a much needed time-out and reflect on what all that money, all that energy, and all those layoffs are adding up to. In the meantime, yo, don’t use Chinese software. Don’t be like the kids rebelling against the TikTok ban by giving even more of their data over to an entity known to surreptitiously take it, aggregate it, and use it. What was it my dad used to say? It’s “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Yeah, that’s brutal but you’ll remember it. He was awesome like that. But then also ask yourself, should you really be putting that many eggs into AI’s basket? This is a pivotal moment in the future of tech. And every one of these takes a reckoning of overconfidence and hubris to shake out the real and lasting benefits and opportunities. I’m already seeing social-media posts from scammers giving you step-by-step instructions on a DeepSeek built trading algorithm guaranteed to game the stock market. I think they just took the crypto template and changed a couple words, maybe using ChatGPT. Wait for all that noise to die down before you make any decisions. I’ll be following along if you want to hop on my email list. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO