Chinese AI company DeepSeek stunned the world — and the US — by creating an AI model that was at par with the best models in the US. And while there have been lots of theories on how this situation came to be, one of the most interesting takes on the issuehas come from Telegram founder Pavel Durov.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has said that China is set to dominate the tech world in the coming years because its education system is more competitive than that of the US. He said that the US education system discourages competition, which dissuades the brightest students from reaching their full potential. Durov says that in contrast, the Chinese education system is brutally competitive, and ends up creating the best students and researchers.
“Following the success of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, many are surprised at how quickly China has caught up with the US in AI,” Durov posted on Telegram. “However, China’s progress in algorithmic efficiency hasn’t come out of nothing. Chinese students have long outperformed others in math and programming at international olympiads,” he said.
“When it comes to producing outstanding performers in math and science, China’s secondary education system is superior to that of the West. It fosters fierce competition among students, a principle borrowed from the highly efficient Soviet model,” Durov added.
“In contrast, most Western schools discourage competition, prohibiting public announcements of students’ grades and rankings. The rationale is understandable — to protect students from pressure or ridicule. However, such measures also predictably demotivate the best students. Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin. Eliminate the losers — and you eliminate the winners,” he said.
“For many students, motivation to excel in high school comes from treating it as a competitive game, striving to rank first against strong opponents. Removing transparency in student performance can make school feel meaningless for ambitious teenagers. It’s not surprising that many gifted kids now find competitive gaming more exciting than academics — at least in video games, they can see how each player ranks,” Durov reasoned.
“Telling all students they are champions, regardless of performance, may seem kind — until you consider how quickly reality will shatter this illusion after graduation. Reality, unlike well-meaning school policies, does have public grades and rankings — whether in sports, business, science, or technology. AI benchmarks that demonstrate DeepSeek’s superiority are one of such public rankings. And more are coming. Unless the US secondary education system undergoes radical reform, China’s growing dominance in technology seems inevitable,” he said.
It’s a pretty astute analysis. China does do very well in international Olympiads, and many of the top AI researchers in the US had studied in China before moving to the United States. And Durov’s point has been made before, most infamously by US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who’d similarly criticized the US education system, but had to deal with blowback from his followers over his observations. But with more people now openly saying that the US school education system isn’t aggressive enough to compete with China, it might require a tweaking of US’s educational policies if it hopes to keep its lead in AI — and other cutting-edge fields — in the coming decades.