Government bodies nationwide have been eager to show they are using DeepSeek’s A.I. technology since the company’s founder met with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
Since the founder of the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek shook hands with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, last month, officials around the country have been racing to show how they are using the company’s technology.
Courthouse officials are using DeepSeek to draft legal judgments within minutes. Doctors at a hospital in Fuzhou, in eastern China, are using it to propose treatment plans. In Meizhou, a city in southern China, it is DeepSeek that answers a government help line.
In Shenzhen, a city near Hong Kong, officials searching for people who had been reported missing or lost said they used DeepSeek to analyze surveillance video and were able to track them down in at least 300 instances.
The enthusiastic embrace of the technology by China’s bureaucracy reflects, in part, what often happens when Mr. Xi, China’s most dominant leader in decades, puts his stamp of approval on something. (Mr. Xi has set off frenzies over soccer, winter sports and high-end manufacturing, for instance.)
But it also shows the momentum that Mr. Xi has created in the years since he made advanced technologies like A.I. and supercomputers central to his vision of China’s someday surging ahead of the United States as a tech superpower. The emergence of DeepSeek showed that it was possible for a Chinese company to make an advanced A.I. system, diminishing the United States’ perceived lead in the strategic technology.
DeepSeek’s rise has been a rare bit of good news at an economically precarious time for China. The inclusion of DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, in a rare meeting that Mr. Xi had with business leaders in Beijing was a sign of approval from the highest level of China’s leadership.