How DC Missed Deepseek

I have a massive retrospective in Arena Magazine on the systemic reasons DC didn’t hear about DeepSeek until 2025.

https://arenamag.com/articles/mr-deepseek-goes-to-washington

One quote:

At no point in 2024 did I hear DeepSeek mentioned in Washington. Late January was when everything changed. A major lesson I’ve learned in the nation’s capital is that it takes around two years for academic and industrial common knowledge to migrate to the swamp.

So honestly, the DeepSeek information cycle came faster than I expected. But unsurprisingly, the pre-DeepSeek policy talking points stayed the same. DC remained fixated on export controls and infrastructure projects. The hard truth is that being two years behind means missing out on important chunks of reality. Remember — the DC wisdom was that two years was the difference between Chinese and American AI. As it turned out, it was the difference in time between reality and reality in Washington.

Summary on twitter:
https://x.com/psychosort/status/1930433938650181885

A one-tweet summary of my argument on science funding:

The most important thing I want Washington to take away from how DeepSeek caught them off-guard is this: however well-funded some AI companies are, there are still so many pieces of the American AI ecosystem that need funding - room to experiment - to take off.