Brian Barrett: Zoë, what do you think about DeepSeek being built in China? Sometimes Chinese models are subject to certain censorship situations. I think DeepSeek has run into that as have other Chinese models. Does that limit its potential upside, or are people just kind of not going to care so much about that? I suspect the latter, but—
Zoë Schiffer: I would be curious what Will Knight, one of our really amazing AI reporters at WIRED would say about this. But so far in my conversations with him, the sense I get is that people don't care. And even US firms that have been kind of championing the US race against China, behind closed doors appear to be using DeepSeek. If for no other reason than it's obviously just a lot cheaper to do, and it's really advanced and its capabilities are good. I also think there's this interesting dynamic where this debate has been playing out in politics around how to handle export controls. Do we cut off China's access to advanced GPUs and chips and so try and slow their progress, or do we give them access to these GPUs and then hopefully make them dependent on US chips? And I think when DeepSeek came out, it felt like almost a signal that cutting them off was not a good move because look, it was spurring them to advance in all of these other ways, because DeepSeek was trained in a really cheap and efficient way.
Now we've seen the Trump administration say, "OK, wait, they can get access to certain cutting-edge chips." And actually China is coming in and saying, "Well, if you're a company operating in this country, we don't want you to be using those American chips." They're trying to tie Chinese AI more closely to Chinese hardware.
Moving on from AI. So the next trend that really defined the magazine this year was the creation and the workings of the so called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. Where to even begin, Brian?
Brian Barrett: Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: This is the story that kept on giving, and for good reason. We recently learned that members of the group are still working, largely we believe unsupervised, across the federal government. So I feel like it's as good a time as any to take stock as to why DOGE remained so important this year.
Brian Barrett: I just this week was looking back at some of our earliest DOGE reporting and was reminded of what a crazy couple of months that was. So just as a reminder for folks who were slumbering through the first half of the year: I'm jealous. I respect that.
Zoë Schiffer: I was just going to say, good for you.
Brian Barrett: The Department of Government Efficiency came about when Elon Musk and Donald Trump got together, and basically Trump gave Elon Musk kind of free rein to do whatever he wanted, and I'm not really exaggerating here, within the federal government. So Musk allies took over various government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which is sort of the human resources for the whole government, the General Services Administration, which is its tech IT department, basically. And from there, kind of fanned out across agencies and were responsible for a lot of the chaos that we saw in this early administration, massive job cuts, massive cuts to USAID, regulations being slashed, not always for good, having everyone in the federal government having to write an email with five points of what they did that week and sending it to never be read. DOGE didn't end up doing what it set out to do.