2025年DeepSeek+AI人才及其对美国创新的影响研究报告（英文版）

A Deep Peek into DeepSeek AI’s Talent and Implications for US Innovation By Amy Zegart and Emerson Johnston APRIL 21, 2025 A collaboration with The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI THE HOOVER INSTITUTION TPA WHITE PAPER SERIES 2 Amy Zegart and Emerson Johnston | A Deep Peek into DeepSeek A Deep Peek into DeepSeek AI’s Talent and Implications for US Innovation By Amy Zegart and Emerson Johnston Chinese startup DeepSeek AI has upended conventional wisdom about artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. Released in January 2025, the company’s R1 language model and V3 general-purpose large language model (LLM) sent tremors through markets and challenged assumptions about American technological superiority in frontier AI development.1 Although DeepSeek AI’s claims that its V3 model was trained for just $6 million have been widely disputed (experts estimate the true compute costs are closer to half a billion dollars, and DeepSeek AI itself says the cost was just for the final training run), the R1 model built on top of V3 demonstrated unprecedented reasoning capabilities and technical achievements that surpassed previous benchmarks set by US companies. Beneath DeepSeek’s technical achievements lies a more consequential story: the shifting patterns of global AI talent that made the company’s breakthroughs possible. This paper examines the educational backgrounds, career paths, and international mobility of more than 200 researchers who authored DeepSeek’s five foundational papers from January 2024 to February 2025. These five papers constitute the corpus of the company’s openly available research papers since its founding in 2023. We find striking evidence that China has developed a robust pipeline of homegrown talent. Nearly all of the researchers behind DeepSeek’s five papers were educated or trained in China. More than half of them never left China for schooling or work, demonstrating the country’s growing capacity to develop world-class AI talent through an entirely domestic pipeline. And while nearly a quarter of DeepSeek researchers gained some experience at US institutions during their careers, most returned to China, creating a one-way knowledge transfer that benefits China’s AI ecosystem. These talent patterns represent a fundamental challenge to US technological leadership that export controls and computing investments alone cannot address. DeepSeek is an early-warning indicator about the essential role that human capital—not just hardware or algorithms—plays in geopolitics, and how America’s talent advantage is eroding. 3 THE HOOVER INSTITUTION TPA WHITE PAPER SERIES Methodology DeepSeek AI, a Chinese AI research company focused on “cost-efficient, high-performance language models,” released five papers on Cornell University’s arXiv.org manuscript archive between 2024 and 2025.2 A total of 223 authors were credited across the five papers. We were able to conduct a comprehensive review of 211 of th