Goldman Knows DeepSeek Affects the Future of Work

I recently asked DeepSeek to model the impact of artificial intelligence on US labor productivity growth. Its calculations suggested that the positive impacts would be discernible in the medium term (5-10 years) and quite substantial further out (a decade and beyond). That’s broadly in line with estimates proffered by reputable economists. But ironically, DeepSeek failed to account for the lessons we’ve learned from DeepSeek itself over the past few weeks.

I’ll get back to the DeepSeek productivity model shortly. But first, consider how the AI timeline may have changed this month. On Jan. 20, the Chinese company wowed users by releasing its R1 model, which seemed to exhibit performance competitive with the best US models but at a fraction of the price. It’s true that some deep-in-the-weeds tech people probably saw this coming (my tech columnist colleagues Catherine Thorbecke and Parmy Olson first wrote about DeepSeek months ago). But to many of us, DeepSeek was a revelation that showed — to borrow the words of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — that the world was experiencing a Sputnik moment. AI was coming hard and fast. It was going to be cheaper and more accessible than many of us imagined. And governments around the world — especially in the US and China — were going to race to ensure that their people and companies were beneficiaries.