"DeepSeek is acting as a fast follower": Ex-OpenAI board member claims China is not leading the AI pack — but President Trump revoking Biden's NVIDIA chip export ban would be "a huge victory"

Helen Toner, Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown's CSET speaks onstage during Vox Media's 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023 in Dana Point, California. .

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has gained traction over the past few weeks. It surpassed OpenAI's o1 reasoning model's capabilities across math, science, and coding at a fraction of the cost incurred by the ChatGPT maker, translating to 3% of the flagship model's development cost. For context, the AI startup reportedly trained its R1 V3-powered AI model with $6 million using the reinforcement learning technique.

The ground-breaking milestone has prompted people to hop onto DeepSeek's hype train, dethroning ChatGPT as the most downloaded free AI app in the United States on Apple's App Store. However, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner seemingly thinks DeepSeek still has a lot more potential to grow and even dominate the space, but only if the stringent AI chips exportation rule imposed by Biden's administration in 2023 blocking shipments of advanced chips to China is revoked.