The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, in light of the success of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model DeepSeek, has called for a radical reform of the secondary education system in the United States, as reported by Tengrinews.kz, citing RBC.
Otherwise, he stated, China's dominance in the technology sector will be inevitable.
"After the success of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, many are surprised at how quickly China has caught up with the U.S. in the field of artificial intelligence. However, China's progress in algorithmic efficiency did not come from nowhere. Chinese students have long outperformed others in mathematics and programming at international Olympiads," Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.
According to him, the secondary education system in China surpasses that of the West: in this country, intense competition among students is encouraged, which the entrepreneur believes was borrowed from the Soviet model.
At the same time, most Western schools do not promote competition, prohibiting the publication of grades and student rankings.
"The reason is clear - to protect students from pressure or ridicule. However, such measures also predictably demotivate the best students. Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin. Eliminate the losers, and you will exclude the winners," he noted.
DeepSeek is a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM) from the eponymous Chinese company, founded in 2023 by co-founder of the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, Lyan Wenfan (the company is now fully owned by this fund).
The DeepSeek chatbot can generate texts of various lengths and genres, search for information on the internet, decipher diagrams, explain images, write code, format it correctly, and solve complex programming tasks in languages such as C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, and others.
On January 20, the company released its first-generation models R1-Zero and R1, built on DeepSeek-V3, to the public. By January 27, the application based on these models surpassed ChatGPT in the rankings of the most downloaded free apps in the App Store in the U.S.
DeepSeek claims to have spent $5.6 million on training one of its latest models, which is significantly less than the funds required for the development of American models.
Due to the success of DeepSeek, shares of the American company NVIDIA, a producer of AI chips, plummeted by 17 percent in one day. It lost its title as the most valuable company in the world, falling behind Apple and Microsoft. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, lost $21 billion. Co-founder of Oracle Corp., Larry Ellison, founder of Dell, Michael Dell, and founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, also incurred losses.
