Allen Zhu Xiaohu, a Chinese venture capitalist best known for his early investments in ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing and the buzzy social app RedNote, said in a recent interview that DeepSeek makes him almost believe in AGI.

Zhu’s remarks quickly went viral in China’s tech community. Some bold quotes include:

• DeepSeek has the fastest app growth in history—no qualifiers needed.

• If they (DeepSeek) establish a global open-source ecosystem like Android, it’ll undoubtedly be a massive opportunity.

• R1 might be regarded as the birth year of AI consciousness. He (Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek CEO) thinks consciousness is a low-level skill.

• Once OpenAI in the U.S. hits a wall and can’t move forward, China will definitely catch up!

• The GPU restraint isn’t that big of a problem anymore. For inference, domestic GPUs work perfectly fine.

• If I spend 10 times the money today and someone else can catch up in a year, at 1/10th of the cost, who’s going to keep throwing money at this?