Once upon a time Kodak was one the largest companies in the world. Digital cameras hit the market. General Motors controlled 60% of the US auto market. The Corolla came along. Nokia sat on almost 40% of global mobile phone sales. iPhone was released. AOL had 30 million users in 2000, by far the largest in the world. Customers switched to broadband. MySpace was the social media site. Suddenly young people moved to Facebook. These giants fell, some faster than others. They were unable to adapt to changing times. As the shockwaves continue to pulsate throughout the global tech sector. Could this David slay the giants? That is the question.
Brazen
DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up founded in 2023 scaled the walls of success to become a conversation. AI was supposed to be the terrain of the giants, not anymore. A brazen newcomer crashed the scene. Even President Trump weighed in saying “It’s a wake-up call.” A new competitor arrived, one that cannot be bought or suppressed.
Not only did DeepSeek beat the US giants, the young Hangzhou young upstart did it cheaper and faster than expected. While Silicon Valley sat back raking in investment for the AI, High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s parent company, outflanked the Goliaths. In one day, tech stocks dropped $1 trillion in value. Maybe Wall Street knew had a premonition of what is coming. In the past it took years for companies to fall from the top. For the hyper connected age where change comes fast, within twenty months a once household brand could be regulated to the graveyard, then forgotten. Technology is an unforgiving field that moves forward, stomping over stumblers.
For the first time, The United States tech platforms must change to a catch up plan in a field they dominate. A nightmare could become a reality, a decline to irrelevancy. So significant is the threat, Fortune Magazine reported Meta head Mark Zuckerberg has convened a war room to counter DeepSeek’s new Chatbot.
The well-known expression from the Chinese philosophy Taoism: What goes up, must come down. These words are resonating in Silicon Valley.
