China has now leapfrogged a lot of their competitors in the West, says AI boss John Clancy, founder and CEO of Galvia AI.
Written by Adrian Weckler, Irish Independent January 30th, 2025
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Ireland and the EU are “sleepwalking into inertia” in the wake of DeepSeek’s rise to disrupt the global tech and AI industry, according to the founder of one of Ireland’s AI firms.
As the Irish Data Protection Commissioner confirmed that it has contacted the Chinese company over how it processes Irish and EU citizens’ personal data, local firms say that a chronic level of underfunding and underdevelopment will see Ireland and the EU relegated to a “distant” also-ran with little power or influence over jobs or the direction of the technology, says John Clancy, founder and CEO of Galvia AI.
“We need to wake up,” said Mr Clancy. “China has now leapfrogged a lot of their competitors in the West – and we are sleepwalking into inertia in this part of the world.”
DeepSeek has over the past week become the most-downloaded AI app in the world after users found that its free, open-source model could match what far more expensive generative large language models (LLMs) could offer.
The Chinese company, whose development costs appear to be a fraction of those currently on top of the global AI industry, upended the Nasdaq exchange earlier this week, erasing more than $1tn of market values and knocking more than €500bn off the value of Nvidia, the leading AI chip manufacturer.
It also prompted questions over whether US president Donald Trump’s $500bn “Stargate” plan for a American AI framework can credibly continue if such a low-cost alternative has emerged.
We are very much a distant third, or maybe fourth behind South America
As tech stocks partially recovered since the initial panic sell-off, Microsoft and OpenAI have opened an investigation into whether DeepSeek illicitly obtained user data from OpenAI’s systems to train its own AI process.
However, according to Mr Clancy, DeepSeek’s emergence has again shone a light on how far Ireland and Europe are falling behind the main players in the AI industry.
“Whether it’s chips, infrastructure, money or just interest, the flow is all going to the US and now China is up there, too,” he says.
“We are very much a distant third, or maybe fourth behind South America.
“It is extremely under-invested, and the ecosystem and infrastructure simply is not there.”
Mr Clancy said that it wasn’t just a question of money.
“The intent is there [in the US and China], because they see the power here. While the US is announcing $500bn for Stargate, in Europe it’s just €1.4bn for deep tech research. We’re just not taking it seriously.”
DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, previously worked as a hedge fund owner, using mathematical algorithms to understand market trends.
His all-Chinese employee team in China is reportedly attempting to get closer to “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a level of AI considered to be decades away, which would allow machines to “think” for themselves.
“This is an internet moment,” said Mr Clancy. “This is 1998 playing out all over again. It’s the start of a lot of disruption and a lot of questioning.
“This is just starting to be democratised and commoditised. It’s going to get easier to get access to it, because as a developer, once you download the API for DeepSeek, you can start playing with their model.”