Renowned American economist Jeffrey Sachs has hailed China's startling advancements in the artificial intelligence sector as a "tremendous breakthrough for the whole world," highlighting the vast potential of the innovative and cost-effective open-source large language model developed by Chinese start-up DeepSeek.
Sachs, who is also a professor at Columbia University, shared his views on China's AI development on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) 2025 Annual Conference, which opened in south China's island province of Hainan on Tuesday.
Often referred to as the "Asian Davos," the four-day event has this year attracted nearly 2,000 attendees from more than 60 countries and regions to participate in a series of events under the theme "Asia in the Changing World: Towards a Shared Future."
China's tech sector has been given a major boost since the start of this year with the emergence of DeepSeek, with the company attracting significant global attention after releasing its new model in January. Many insiders have commented on how the DeepSeek model's advanced reasoning capabilities are on par with other leading AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT while being created at only a fraction of the development cost.
Speaking in Boao Town on Wednesday, Sachs said the sudden rise of DeepSeek caught the U.S. by surprise, and believes its open source program now makes AI available for everybody, rather than having several larger tech firms dominate the market.
"When it came to AI and large language models, the United States thought 'well, we are many, many years in advance'. And then DeepSeek came along out of nowhere, I would say, with a young, very clever design and entrepreneurship and showed 'we can do what you're doing at much, much less cost'. So this was a tremendous breakthrough for the whole world, because suddenly it put AI, not in the hands of Microsoft or Meta or OpenAI, a few giants, but now available for everybody, and did it in an extremely clever way as open source. So now, China is becoming the basis of worldwide open source AI," he said.
Amid calls for responsible global governance of AI and concerns over how to handle the development of this fast-evolving tool, Sachs stressed that technologies like DeepSeek ultimately have the potential to bring substantial benefits to society and the world.
"Technology and ideas spread around the world. They are public goods, we say, or in economics: ideas and know-how are non-rival goods, meaning that if you develop a technology like DeepSeek, it can benefit the whole world. If I use it, it doesn't mean you can't use it. In fact, if I use it, it's more likely you will use it. It's a wonderful kind of good, not a normal commodity, but something that can benefit everybody," Sachs said.
DeepSeek breakthrough to benefit whole world, make AI available for everybody: US economist
