@itsolelehmann: Deepseek just casually closed the biggest AI round in Chinese history but most people in the West still don't get it: T…

Deepseek just casually closed the biggest AI round in Chinese history but most people in the West still don't get it: This isn't a normal startup. The Chinese government is essentially building DeepSeek into the AI company that runs the country. Back in February, Xi Jinping pulled together a small private meeting in Beijing with the most important CEOs in China: The founders of BYD, Huawei, and a few others. He invited DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, into that room and personally told government officials to start using DeepSeek by name. That kind of direct endorsement from the top of the Chinese government almost never happens. After that, the money started pouring in from the government itself. There's a giant Chinese government fund called Big Fund III. It has over $50 billion to spend on AI and chips. It only invests in companies the Chinese government wants to win. Big Fund III is now backing DeepSeek alongside Tencent in the round that just closed: $7 billion at a $51.5 billion valuation. The founder, Liang, personally put in $3B of his own money and still owns 90% of the company (unheard of in the West)!! DeepSeek also gets tax breaks and government research money from a special "high-tech" status the government granted it back in 2023. And around all of this, the Chinese government is spending massive amounts of money to build the AI infrastructure DeepSeek needs to grow. 17 Chinese provinces are giving out free compute credits worth up to $300,000 to AI companies. Beijing has spent over $6 billion building giant data centers in the western part of the country. But the most insane part is how fast they're rolling DeepSeek out across the country. 72 local Chinese governments are now running DeepSeek inside their own offices to handle paperwork and admin. Shenzhen, a city of 17 million people, gave DeepSeek to 20,000 of its government workers. Document approval times dropped by 90%. 90 of China's biggest hospitals are using DeepSeek on real patients to help doctors make decisions. One hospital said it became 40x more efficient at patient follow-ups. > Universities are running it on their supercomputers. > Hotel chains use it for customer service. > Local police are using it to help find missing people. Then in August, the Chinese government made it an official national policy. They issued something called "AI Plus" basically ordering every Chinese ministry to start using AI in everything they do. There is nothing even remotely like this happening in the West. Sam Altman doesn't own 90% of OpenAI. The US government isn't putting billions of dollars directly into Anthropic. The president isn't bringing AI founders into the White House to publicly tell other government agencies to use their product. In America, AI companies compete with each other for customers. In China, one company is being chosen by the government, funded by the government, and installed inside the government, all at the same time. It’ll be interesting to see where this approach leads, that’s for sure. V4.1 (Deepseek’s agent model) ships in June.