Cloud Capital vs AI: DeepSeek, Technofeudalism, Capitalism, and the New Cold War
SHORT VIDEO CLIPS, 3 Feb 2025
Yanis Varoufakis | DiEM25 – TRANSCEND Media Service
28 Jan 2025
Yanis Varoufakis delves into the seismic developments of January 2025, spotlighting the transformative impact of DeepSeek—a groundbreaking Chinese AI company that has sent shockwaves through the global tech and financial landscapes.
By releasing free, open-source AI models, DeepSeek has not only disrupted the American stock markets but has also outperformed proprietary giants like OpenAI’s GPT-4, challenging the very foundations of the AI industry.
Varoufakis unpacks the far-reaching implications of this upheaval, framing it within the context of techno-feudalism. He critiques the monopolistic “cloud capital” models typified by Amazon’s Alexa, contrasting them with the democratizing potential of commodified AI services such as ChatGPT. The discussion extends into the geopolitical arena, analyzing the intensifying tech rivalry between the United States and China and what it signals for the future of global power dynamics.
Yanis Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 Party, professor of economics at the University of Athens, and co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement). He is the author of ‘And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future’; ‘Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment’; and, most recently, the novel ‘Another Now’.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence AI, Big tech, China, Competition, Silicon valley, Trade, USA, Wall Street
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Feb 2025.
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