Scale AI CEO says China has quickly caught the U.S. with the DeepSeek open-source model
The U.S. may have led China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.
Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta, said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an “earth-shattering model” on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.
“What we’ve found is that DeepSeek … is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Wang said.
In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs — AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models — than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls.
Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach a trillion dollars, on par with estimates that the generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
“The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding, “We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom.”
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure. The project, Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners will include Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.
In the interview Thursday, Wang said he believes that it’ll take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a widely cited but vaguely defined benchmark used in the AI sector to denote a branch of AI pursuing technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we’re close to attaining it and some saying it’s not possible at all. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful AI systems that are able to use a computer just like you or I could … and basically be a remote worker in the most capable way.”
Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, ramped up its technology development throughout the past year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.
When asked which U.S. artificial intelligence startups are leading the AI race right now, Wang said that models each have their own strengths — for instance, OpenAI’s models are great at reasoning, while Anthropic’s are great at coding.
“The space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of DeepSeek’s reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1.
Technology
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EToro, a stock brokerage platform that’s been ramping up in crypto, has priced its IPO at $52 a share, as the company prepares to test the market’s appetite for new offerings.
The Israel-based company raised nearly $310 million, selling nearly 6 million shares in a deal that values the business at about $4.2 billion. The company had planned to sell shares at $46 to $50 each. Another almost 6 million shares are being sold by existing investors.
IPOs looked poised for a rebound when President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January after a prolonged drought spurred by rising interest rates and inflationary concerns. CoreWeave’s March debut was a welcome sign for IPO hopefuls such as eToro, online lender Klarna and ticket reseller StubHub.
But tariff uncertainty temporarily stalled those plans. The retail trading platform filed for an initial public offering in March, but shelved plans as rising tariff uncertainty rattled markets. Klarna and StubHub did the same.
EToro’s Nasdaq debut, under ticker symbol ETOR, may indicate whether the public market is ready to take on risk. Digital physical therapy company Hinge Health has started its IPO roadshow, and said in a filing on Tuesday that it plans to raise up to $437 million in its upcoming offering. Also on Tuesday, fintech company Chime filed its prospectus with the SEC.
Another trading app, Webull, merged with a special-purpose acquisition company in April.
Founded in 2007 by brothers Yoni and Ronen Assia along with David Ring, eToro competes with the likes of Robinhood and makes money through fees related to trading, including spreads on buy and sell orders, and non-trading activities such as withdrawals and currency conversion.
Net income jumped almost thirteenfold last year to $192.4 million from $15.3 million a year earlier. The company has been ramping up its crypto business, with revenue from cryptoassets more than tripling to over $12 million in 2024. One-quarter of its net trading contribution last year came from crypto, up from 10% the prior year.
This isn’t eToro’s first attempt at going public. In 2022, the company scrapped plans to hit the market through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) during a sharp downturn in equity markets. The deal would have valued the company at more than $10 billion.
CEO Yoni Assia told CNBC early last year that eToro was still aiming for a market debut but “evaluating the right opportunity” as it was building relationships with exchanges, including the Nasdaq.
“We definitely are eyeing the public markets,” he said at the time. “I definitely see us becoming eventually a public company.”
EToro said in its prospectus that BlackRock had expressed interest in buying $100 million in shares at the IPO price. The company said it planned to sell 5 million shares in the offering, with existing investors and executives selling another 5 million.
Underwriters for the deal include Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and UBS.
— CNBC’s Ryan Browne and Jordan Novet contributed reporting
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