The Biden Administration’s move on Jan. 13 to curb exports on the advanced computer chips used to power artificial intelligence (AI) arrived in the wake of two major events over the Christmas holidays that rattled the world of AI.
First, OpenAI released its latest model, o3, which achieved an 88% on a set of difficult reasoning tests on which no AI system had previously scored above 5%. “All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated” in light of the results, said Francois Chollet, a former AI researcher at Google and a prominent skeptic of the argument that “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) would be achieved any time soon.
Second, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an open-source AI model that outperformed any American open-source language model, including Meta’s Llama series. The achievement surprised many AI researchers and U.S. officials, who had believed China lagged behind in terms of AI capabilities. …