Deep Seek Shock: Our Perception of China – Is It Time to Change Now?

Jo Sang-rae, CEO of Platum, strongly criticized our society's prejudice and complacency regarding the explosive growth of Chinese AI at GSAT2025 in Changwon, Gyeongnam. He pointed out that the GPUs held by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek amount to 2.5 times that of the entire Republic of Korea, and that they can achieve similar performance with only 6% of ChatGPT's development cost, or offer better performance for free like Alibaba's Q1 model. CEO Jo expressed his surprise, asking "Can China be this advanced?", and then immediately criticized the double standard of Korean society that rejects Chinese technology by invoking 'personal information leakage risks'. This is a criticism that while society is lenient towards ChatGPT, it views China through colored glasses. China is integrating AI into all industries through its national 'AI+' action plan and Manufacturing 2035, to the extent that it has 'staked its existence on AI'. Characteristic features include not only comprehensive investments by big tech companies, such as Alibaba investing 76 trillion won in AI infrastructure over the next three years, but also a strategy of rapidly releasing products to the market through open source with an 'just try it' spirit and improving them in real-time. Remarkable progress is also seen in the robotics sector. Not only have humanoid robots completed marathons, but 'Humanoid Olympics' are also being held to compete on technology, and humanoid robots costing around 20 million won are being practically used in manufacturing and homes. The startup ecosystem is being reorganized around hard tech such as generative AI, humanoids, and biotechnology, like the 'Six Dragons' centered in Hangzhou, striving to build a 'self-reliant innovation ecosystem'. Furthermore, innovations directly applied to daily life are prominent, including electric vehicle popularization policies, BYD's parallel parking technology, Nio's battery swap service, and Meituan's commercialization of drone delivery. CEO Jo emphasized that China is changing at an overwhelming pace, to the extent that there is no common ground between data from 2023 and 2024, and urged our society to shed its colored glasses, coolly grasp reality, and seek independent strategies. He also offered practical advice: when utilizing AI, subscribe to an agent service that integrates and manages various AIs instead of relying on a specific single service. The DeepSeek shock is not merely a technological shock, but poses fundamental questions about how we view the world.