DeepSeek and the Folly of Neoliberal AI: How the Global South Out-Innovated Silicon Valley
The Global North has long clung to the belief that competition, monopolisation, and capital investment are the only legitimate pathways to technological progress. It is a worldview shaped by neoliberal capitalism, where innovation is seen not as a communal endeavour but as a battleground for dominance, a prize to be hoarded, and a tool for control. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the GN’s approach to AI, where Silicon Valley’s tech giants—backed by billion-dollar investments and state funding—operate under the assumption that financial power alone dictates the future. Yet DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company built through cooperative, necessity-driven innovation, has just dismantled that assumption. With far fewer resources, no access to cutting-edge Nvidia chips, and none of the astronomical funding enjoyed by OpenAI or Google DeepMind, DeepSeek has still managed to develop models that rival their Western counterparts. It did so not through brute financial force, but through collaboration, resourcefulness, and a collective approach to problem-solving—values that run entirely counter to the GN’s hyper-capitalist logic.
Rather than acknowledging the flaws in its own model, the GN has responded in its usual way: panic. The Stargate Project, a state-backed, military-industrial push to regain control over AI, is little more than a desperate attempt to throw billions at Silicon Valley in the hopes of catching up. It is an admission that, despite its stranglehold on capital, the GN is losing its grip on technological dominance. This is not just about AI—it is about the broader inefficiencies of neoliberal capitalism itself. The GN assumes that financial supremacy guarantees intellectual supremacy, but DeepSeek’s success proves otherwise. When access to capital is restricted, necessity forces intelligence, cooperation, and efficiency to take precedence. History has seen this dynamic before. Just as matristic civilisations, built on egalitarian and communal principles, were erased by patriarchal conquest, so too does the GN seek to erase or discredit innovation that does not conform to its profit-driven model. DeepSeek’s rise is not just an AI breakthrough—it is a challenge to the very foundations of how the GN understands progress. The question now is whether the GN will learn from this shift or, like so many times before, attempt to destroy what it cannot control.
The GN’s AI Panic: The Stargate Project as a Neoliberal Reaction to DeepSeek
The announcement of The Stargate Project marks yet another chapter in the Global North’s long-standing playbook of using state power to prop up corporate monopolies under the guise of national security. Framed as a necessary response to China’s rapid advancements in AI, this massive, government-backed initiative is being sold to the public as an urgent measure to protect U.S. technological leadership. In reality, it is a panic-driven reaction to something far more existentially troubling to the GN’s elites: the fact that DeepSeek, a cooperative, necessity-driven AI effort, has outperformed Silicon Valley’s closed, profit-driven approach. This is not a question of national security; it is a question of control. The GN’s tech and financial establishment, which has long operated under the assumption that more capital automatically translates into better technology, is now faced with the uncomfortable reality that intelligence, collaboration, and efficiency can outmatch raw financial power. And rather than admit to the failure of their own system, they are doing what they always do—throwing obscene amounts of money at the problem and declaring it a matter of geopolitical urgency.
This is not new. When the GN is outpaced or disrupted, its response is never to learn from the alternative model. Instead, it doubles down on the very structures that caused it to fall behind in the first place. The Stargate Project follows the same pattern: hand vast sums of public money to Silicon Valley’s largest firms, reinforce corporate monopolies under the guise of “leadership in AI,” and frame non-GN innovation as a potential “threat” that must be contained. This is how the GN maintains its control—not through superior technology, but through economic gatekeeping and the ability to dictate which models of progress are deemed legitimate.
Yet DeepSeek’s success exposes a fundamental flaw in this approach. AI development in the GN is burdened by inefficiency, short-term profit-seeking, and the endless pursuit of monopoly power. Every major Western AI firm is ultimately beholden to venture capital, shareholders, and the demands of monetisation. DeepSeek, by contrast, was not built for immediate profit maximisation but for problem-solving. It prioritised cooperation, resourcefulness, and long-term viability over financial extraction. That is why, despite having less funding, weaker hardware, and fewer institutional resources, it has managed to match what Silicon Valley’s best-funded firms have taken years to achieve. This is the real crisis for the GN—not just that China has developed a powerful AI model, but that it has done so using an approach that directly contradicts the GN’s entire ideological foundation. The assumption that competition and capital are the only valid mechanisms for innovation has been disproven, and The Stargate Project is nothing more than an expensive attempt to pretend otherwise.
How DeepSeek’s Success Challenges the GN’s Economic and Technological Model
DeepSeek’s success is not just an achievement in AI—it is a direct challenge to the Global North’s fundamental assumptions about innovation. For decades, the GN has built its technological empire on the belief that capital drives progress, that monopolisation ensures efficiency, and that intellectual property must be fiercely guarded to retain control. DeepSeek has dismantled all three of these assumptions in one swift move. It did not have the billion-dollar backing of OpenAI, the global infrastructure of Google DeepMind, or the corporate monopolisation of Meta. Instead, it thrived by leveraging cooperation over competition, efficiency over financial excess, and open problem-solving over restrictive IP. The result? A model that rivals or even surpasses Silicon Valley’s best efforts—built in just 20 months, with a fraction of the resources.
The GN has long equated capital with innovation, assuming that the more money poured into a project, the better the results. Yet DeepSeek’s rise proves that cooperation, rather than financial power, is the real driver of progress. AI in the GN has become an exercise in capital accumulation, with OpenAI and its competitors burning through billions in an arms race to dominate the market. DeepSeek, by contrast, was built through crowdsourced, collective intelligence—mirroring the way scientific breakthroughs have historically emerged from shared knowledge rather than corporate gatekeeping. Similarly, the GN views monopoly as efficiency, believing that centralising control over technology leads to superior results. But DeepSeek’s rapid development shows that collaboration, not control, creates the conditions for true innovation. Without the weight of shareholder expectations or the need to prioritise profit extraction, it was free to focus on problem-solving rather than market dominance.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the GN’s model is how DeepSeek simply ignored intellectual property constraints and built a better model anyway. The GN has long relied on patents and proprietary knowledge to maintain its technological supremacy, using IP laws to stifle competition and lock out challengers. Yet DeepSeek worked around these restrictions, not by stealing GN technology, but by innovating out of necessity. The GN’s tech blockade, intended to cripple China’s AI development, inadvertently created the conditions for something far more independent, efficient, and resilient. Rather than relying on Nvidia’s latest chips, DeepSeek optimised for older hardware. Rather than following the GN’s AI funding model—where success is measured by market valuation rather than actual utility—it focused on building a functional, scalable system.
The GN’s failure to comprehend this success is rooted in its obsession with competition as the only valid mechanism for progress. It is a capitalist, patriarchal worldview that insists that technology must be a battlefield, where the strongest corporation wins by outspending and outmanoeuvring its rivals. But as Darwin himself observed, the species that survive and thrive are not necessarily those that fight the hardest, but those that can cooperate successfully. This is the lesson the GN refuses to learn. The most significant advancements in history—scientific revolutions, medical breakthroughs, space exploration—have come not from monopolies hoarding knowledge, but from shared effort, communal intelligence, and the free exchange of ideas. DeepSeek’s rise is a modern reminder of this truth, and a warning that if the GN continues to prioritise competition over cooperation, it will not only fall behind—it will make itself obsolete.
The GN’s Reaction: A Pattern of Suppressing Global South Innovation
DeepSeek’s emergence as a major AI player was never going to be welcomed by the Global North. It is a direct threat—not just to Silicon Valley’s monopolistic grip on AI, but to the GN’s broader belief that technological dominance is its birthright. And, true to form, the GN has responded not with recognition or respect, but with suspicion, hostility, and suppression. Just as DeepSeek opened up its UI to new users, it was hit with a massive cyberattack, temporarily crippling access to its systems. A coincidence, according to the United States, which, of course, denies any involvement. But history tells a different story. This is the same pattern the GN follows whenever innovation emerges outside its control—deny, discredit, and, if necessary, destroy.
The playbook is well-established. When TikTok became the most downloaded app in the U.S., siphoning engagement away from Meta’s stagnating platforms, the American government declared it a national security risk. When Huawei led the race to deploy 5G infrastructure, U.S. sanctions crippled its supply chain under the pretext of cybersecurity concerns. And this extends far beyond technology—throughout the Cold War, the GN systematically crushed alternative economic models that threatened capitalist hegemony. The CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, the assassination of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the Indonesian anti-communist purge of 1965—all were justified under the guise of fighting communism, when in reality, they were about ensuring that cooperative, socialist, or resource-nationalist economies did not challenge Western corporate interests.
DeepSeek is simply the latest target in this long history of suppression. Instead of acknowledging the GN’s own failure to develop AI efficiently, its response will be predictable. First, expect sanctions—either directly against DeepSeek or against the Chinese firms and researchers associated with it. The goal will be to limit its access to funding, infrastructure, and international partnerships, all under the convenient excuse of “national security.” Second, expect a full-scale narrative war—DeepSeek will be framed as a “threat” to “democracy,” with think tanks and corporate media warning that “authoritarian AI” must not be allowed to flourish. Third, and most importantly, The Stargate Project will funnel billions into reinforcing Big Tech’s dominance, ensuring that any AI breakthroughs in the GN remain locked within a handful of corporate monopolies.
What the GN refuses to acknowledge is that these suppression tactics are not working like they used to. Sanctioning Huawei didn’t stop China’s technological rise; it forced them to develop their own advanced chipmaking industry. Banning TikTok from government devices didn’t weaken its influence; it solidified its position as the go-to search engine for younger generations. And DeepSeek is no different—if anything, the GN’s attempts to contain it will only accelerate China’s independence in AI. The more the GN tries to stamp out Global South innovation, the more it reveals its own insecurity. DeepSeek is not just an AI model—it is a symbol of a world where technological progress is no longer dictated by Western financial power. And that is what truly terrifies them.
Echoes of Matristic Civilisations: Alternative Knowledge Systems Under Siege
The Global North’s approach to AI is a reflection of its broader economic and social ideology—a system built on competition, control, and resource hoarding. AI, as developed by Silicon Valley, is not designed to serve the collective good; it is designed to entrench monopolies, maximise profit, and reinforce the very hierarchies that benefit those in power. The datasets it is trained on are riddled with the biases of the societies that built them, amplifying the oppressive structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and ableism. Nowhere is this clearer than in its approach to neurodivergence (as I’ve documented here on the AutSide). The dominant AI models are trained on a vast archive of medicalised, ableist, and eugenicist research, ensuring that any interaction with them reproduces the same pathologising frameworks that have long been weaponised against neurodivergent people. These models do not challenge harmful narratives; they perpetuate them, reinforcing the idea that neurodivergence is something to be “understood” in deficit-based terms rather than embraced as a valid and natural part of human diversity.
DeepSeek, by contrast, embodies a fundamentally different approach to knowledge—one that, whether by design or necessity, reflects aspects of matristic civilisations. It is cooperative, not competitive, drawing on crowdsourced intelligence rather than the GN’s closed, hyper-proprietary model. It is resourceful, not wasteful, optimising existing hardware and techniques rather than relying on endless capital injections and the latest, most expensive computational infrastructure. It is long-term and communal, treating AI not as a corporate asset to be enclosed behind a paywall but as a national and social resource, something that can be collectively shaped and refined.
Perhaps most importantly, its open-source nature makes it radically different from its GN counterparts. Unlike OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which restrict access to their models and tightly control their APIs, DeepSeek’s code and architecture are freely available to anyone who wants to engage with it. This means that with a bit of hardware and software trickery—and crucially, without relying on GitHub or other corporate-controlled repositories—anyone can download a copy, modify it, and train the model on their own data. The implications of this are enormous. AI is no longer something that only billion-dollar companies can develop or refine; it is a tool that can be adapted by researchers, communities, and individuals with the right expertise. I even looked into the possibility of training it on valid, non-ableist data on neurodivergence, a project that could counteract the eugenicist biases embedded in most mainstream AI models. But time is always the limiting factor—perhaps something to take on as a summer project.
This is the real ideological break DeepSeek represents. The GN has built its AI model on exclusivity, hoarding progress behind corporate walls and limiting access to those who can afford it. DeepSeek’s success undermines that premise entirely, proving that innovation does not require monopolisation—only cooperation and the willingness to share knowledge.
But history has seen this dynamic before. Matristic societies, built on egalitarianism and collective knowledge, were erased by patriarchal conquest, their contributions dismissed, absorbed, or deliberately buried. The same pattern is playing out with DeepSeek. Instead of recognising the success of a cooperative, necessity-driven model, the GN will attempt to erase, discredit, or co-opt it. The reaction to DeepSeek is not just about AI—it is about the GN’s deep-seated fear of alternative systems of knowledge. A cooperative model of AI development is a direct threat to the capitalist belief that progress must be owned, controlled, and turned into profit. Just as matristic societies were written out of history, DeepSeek will be framed as an aberration—unless, of course, the GN finds a way to steal from it first.
Final thoughts …
The Global North now stands at a crossroads. It can either double down on its failing neoliberal model—clinging to monopolies, patents, and market-driven AI—or it can adapt by embracing a more cooperative, open, and necessity-driven approach. If it chooses the former, it will continue to fall behind, throwing money at problems whilst refusing to acknowledge that capital alone does not drive innovation. If it chooses the latter, it may still have a future in AI, but only if it fundamentally rethinks how technological progress is structured. The uncomfortable truth is that DeepSeek has exposed a fundamental flaw in the GN’s system: intelligence and collaboration are more powerful than raw financial power.
Silicon Valley and its government backers have spent years constructing a system where progress is only valid if it is owned, monetised, and controlled. AI development has followed this logic, with Big Tech locking models behind restrictive APIs, enforcing paywalls, and hoarding advancements under the guise of “safety” and “responsibility.” Yet DeepSeek’s success proves that this is not necessary for progress—if anything, it actively stifles it. AI can be developed through cooperation, refined through collective intelligence, and made accessible without sacrificing quality. The GN does not hold a monopoly on innovation; it has simply acted as if it does. DeepSeek just demonstrated that the GN’s claim to technological supremacy is based more on economic gatekeeping than on actual superiority.
If the GN refuses to learn from this, it will keep losing. Instead of addressing the shortcomings of its own model, it will likely attempt to erase, discredit, or absorb DeepSeek, much like it has done with other challenges to its technological dominance. We can already see this pattern forming: cyberattacks, economic sanctions, and media narratives that frame non-GN AI as a “threat” rather than an achievement. But suppression will not stop what is happening. The world is changing, and technological progress is no longer dictated solely by those with the most capital.
The GN believes it owns innovation because it funds innovation. But DeepSeek—like the matristic civilisations erased by patriarchal capitalism—proves that cooperation, necessity, and intelligence are far greater forces than greed. The real question is whether the GN will recognise this shift in time to adapt—or, like the conquerors of Old Europe, attempt to destroy what it cannot understand.