A journalist who cuts through the hype about AI & DeepSeek

Here I think is a journalist who doesn't have a technology background, getting to the nub of the matter.

See - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/02/deepseek-ai-veil-of-mystique-tech-bros-fear

He gets the point, which folk at Skool have already grasped, that the long-term impact is economic, saying "The true impact of DeepSeek is not on the technology but on the economics of AI."

After reviewing the situation and its external connections, he concludes -

"Concerns about privacy, censorship and surveillance, rightly raised by amodel such as DeepSeek, can help obscure the reality that such issues bedevil all AI technology, not just that from China. Particularly at a time of threatened trade wars and threats to democracy, our capacity to navigate between the hype and the fear assumes new importance.".

Does AI have a viable future as a tool-component of some other practical and reliable product, sold commercially? Do such business models exist? Or are the unreliability and privacy weaknesses of AI (as currently implemented, via external Internet-accessed mix of 'scraped from anywhere' and official data-sources) too great? The issue is surely that material on Internet has no mediation, there's no gatekeeper or editor-in-change, it's totally disintermediated. Any old guff can appear in the 'global-village database'.

That effectively asks "Can a sufficiently good AI run standalone, accessing a local database of known quality?". Which is what some Skool folk are exploring, I think.

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