Our Sputnik Moment

[00:00:00] Dr. Joe: Did we just have our generation's Sputnik moment? I think we did. I'll explain in this video.

[00:00:05] Dr. Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:14] Dr. Joe: Welcome to Safe and Innovative Schools. I'm Dr. Joe Phillips and today we're diving into a topic that could redefine the future of AI for education in America.

[00:00:23] Dr. Joe: In 1957, Russia launched Sputnik. It was the first artificial satellite in space, and it caught the United States completely off guard.

[00:00:33] Dr. Joe: And by 1958, Congress had passed the National Defense Education Act that brought things like STEM education into our educational ecosystem, and really started to prepare our students to be competitive in the global space race and in the Cold War.

[00:00:51] Dr. Joe: What we saw this week in AI was actually a lot of news.

[00:00:54] Dr. Joe: We saw some things about OpenAI's computer use agent, which was really cool at [00:01:00] the beginning of the week, how their model can serve as the eyes, keyboard, and mouse for a computer, can go off and autonomously or independently perform tasks on your behalf.

[00:01:11] Dr. Joe: and in almost a response to that, we had two models come out from China almost immediately.

[00:01:19] Dr. Joe: Deep seek AI and Alibaba's Quinn AI that have both come out really competitive with OpenAI and Deep Mind and some of these other state of the art models that are out and they are competing. without the chips that we wouldn't let China have. And they're competing at a fraction and I mean fraction, maybe 1/50th of the costs that it took for the United States leading AI companies to build and scale their models.

[00:01:49] Dr. Joe: So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about the impact that this Sputnik moment, This new AI arms race that just kicked off [00:02:00] what it's going to mean for education in the United States and potentially across the world.

[00:02:04] Dr. Joe: So let's break down what happened this week. Specifically, we're going to focus in on DeepSeek AI and the shockwave that it has set off across the world when it comes to AI and when it comes to the global economy surrounding AI.

[00:02:18] Dr. Joe: But let's break down what DeepSeek AI actually is. So DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company and they recently launched their R1 model.

[00:02:27] Dr. Joe: It's an AI system that they were able to train again for about 1/50th of the cost for similar Western models.

[00:02:34] Dr. Joe: So companies like OpenAI, Google, AWS, and some of these others have spent billions of dollars to build and train their models. And what DeepSeek was able to do is come in for a handful of millions of dollars, which still is a lot of money, but is nothing compared to the, economics that went into building these original models that [00:03:00] were built in the United States.

[00:03:02] Dr. Joe: And also something that's really impressive about what Deepseek was able to do is we had sanctions on these semiconductors going to China. So they had to find a way to do this without using the same chipsets that we had available to the companies in the United States.

[00:03:20] Dr. Joe: And the CEO of DeepSeek did a couple of things.

[00:03:22] Dr. Joe: One bought 10, 000 chips back in 2021 before the sanctions kicked in, but also reprogrammed the chips themselves, as well as other chips to be able to do more with the the outdated technology that they had.

[00:03:36] Dr. Joe: And so the knowledge base that we had set up around understanding what it takes to build and train these AI systems has just been flipped on its head.

[00:03:46] Dr. Joe: And it's shown now that it doesn't take billions of dollars. It doesn't take this massive investment. We don't need the latest and greatest chips to be able to build competitive models. And. Outside of whether this is an [00:04:00] arms race now between China and the United States, what it shows is the startup economy for large models is going to scale at a way that we never thought possible, or we thought would take a much longer time to get to than what we've just seen.

[00:04:17] Dr. Joe: This has some major implications for AI dominance. The stock market is already getting upset. You can see stock prices coming down with chip makers like Nvidia and some of these other secondary and tertiary providers to the AI market.

[00:04:32] Dr. Joe: So we're seeing some decline in values, but beyond those economics, the real question is for me as the educational leader, what is the impact of this on education specifically in the United States?

[00:04:45] Dr. Joe: How does DeepSeek challenge the U. S. dominance in AI? Could cost effective AI models make AI more accessible to schools? And what risks does this pose for data security and national security? So we saw on [00:05:00] Monday with the launch of R1, that by the afternoon, DeepSeek was already getting a cyber attack. So we can see these models are vulnerable and these companies are vulnerable to cyber attacks.

[00:05:10] Dr. Joe: So what does that mean when we're putting our student data in some of these models?

[00:05:15] Dr. Joe: Let's back up a moment and talk about 1957 when Sputnik was launched.

[00:05:21] Dr. Joe: Again, it caught us completely off guard inside the United States. We thought we were winning the space race at that point in time. And, uh, it really, it was a gut punch to us.

[00:05:30] Dr. Joe: And what I am seeing is a very similar gut punch today or this week, as we are reeling with what has happened in the AI world.

[00:05:40] Dr. Joe: And we saw earlier this week. About project Stargate, uh, and bringing in an infusion of 100 billion or so to build AI data centers, some AI energy and be able to try to maintain this AI dominance.

[00:05:58] Dr. Joe: And by the end of the [00:06:00] week, midweek, we're, we're seeing that it's a different world, already in that AI has been opened and the competition and the race is absolutely on.

[00:06:10] Dr. Joe: So, in response to Sputnik in 1957,

[00:06:13] Dr. Joe: by 1958, the United States had passed the National Defense Education Act, injecting billions of dollars into STEM education, research, and workforce development, and that investment really laid the foundation in the United States for For us to have technology leadership for decades.

[00:06:31] Dr. Joe: It's what started this whole, let's get to the moon within 10 years and, all the stuff that followed and really did make us a powerhouse.

[00:06:39] Dr. Joe: I think the question is if we did just experience our 21st century Sputnik moment.

[00:06:47] Dr. Joe: Do we need to have something like the NDEA happen again? Do we need some sort of law that is injecting money, resources, [00:07:00] regulations, goals, all of that around how the United States can be the AI powerhouse and be the AI dominator in the world. Do we need to rinse and repeat that again? And if we did, what would that look like?

[00:07:16] Dr. Joe: Would we use that money to fund cyber security programs, AI programs, teaching students how to learn about, from, and with AI?

[00:07:26] Dr. Joe: Do we even need to do this, or is AI going to do a lot of this?

[00:07:31] Dr. Joe: Can our AI prep our students to do AI work, or will we even need students to do AI work Can we strengthen those public private partnerships for AI and data security curriculum, can we invest in extended reality with that virtual reality and that augmented reality? Can we invest in secure AI solutions for schools? And can we train the new generation of students for this new world that we have seen emerge this week?

[00:07:58] Dr. Joe: I think we all thought we had a [00:08:00] little bit more time than we're actually seeing that we have in the race. China is not two to three years behind us like we thought they were. They are right neck and neck with us. And so Again, gut punch, and we have to figure out how we're going to push through on that.

[00:08:18] Dr. Joe: Another question that I'm thinking about is, are we going to continue training our students for jobs that are not going to exist anymore. We've talked for years now, decades, about how we need to prepare our students for jobs that don't yet exist.

[00:08:34] Dr. Joe: But is it time to stop preparing them for jobs that are no longer going to exist? And that's a very different thing. And are we built to do that or do we need to come in and reevaluate our educational system as part of a national effort to make sure that we grab and maintain AI dominance?

[00:08:55] Dr. Joe: So, if we did just witness our Sputnik moment of the 21st century, [00:09:00] is the U. S. going to respond the same way that we did in the 20th century? Are we going to invest in education and innovation? Will we do the same now that AI is becoming the defining technology of the 21st century? Or, will history repeat itself?

[00:09:17] Dr. Joe: Will we let China or some other country grab the AI power and become the AI dominant force in the world?

[00:09:27] Dr. Joe: Thanks for tuning in to Safe and Innovative Schools. I'm Dr. Joe Phillips. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please subscribe, share it with your friends and colleagues, and I'm very excited to see you on the next episode.

[00:09:39] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.