Innovation starts in schools — lessons from China
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Primary-school children take lessons from a humanoid robot in Hefei, China. Credit: Zhang Dagang/VCG via Getty
In early 2025, the Chinese artificial-intelligence company DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, unveiled DeepSeek-R1, a high-performance large language model developed at a fraction of the cost of its Western counterparts. Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment”. Later that year, Chinese robotics firm Unitree, also based in Hangzhou, released its R1 humanoid robot, which has capabilities approaching those of much more expensive Western systems. Together, these advances have revived a global debate about how nations cultivate and secure technological leadership.
The number of China’s elite scientists who have been trained abroad is falling