In April 2025, we analyzed the 223 researchers behind DeepSeek's first five papers and found that the company's talent ran deeper than the prevailing story allowed. This update extends the analysis to all seven of DeepSeek's foundational papers, adding V3.2 (December 2025) and V4 (April 2026). The author pool has grown to 356, but the findings from last year hold. More importantly, most have sharpened.

Original Reddit post

Following up on an April 2025 analysis of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Senior Fellow Amy Zegart and coauthor Emerson Johnston find that DeepSeek’s researchers are more cited and more credentialed than they were a year ago, and still over half of them have never held an affiliation outside China. Among those who did train in the United States, most returned home, and the length of their stay did not meaningfully predict whether they returned. The data points to two distinct problems for US policy, Zegart and Johnston argue. The first is retention: American institutions train researchers who leave. The second is independence: China now produces, at an unprecedented scale, frontier AI researchers who never pass through the United States at all. Neither of these problems are likely to resolve without concerted policy changes, the authors write. submitted by /u/HooverInstitution

Originally posted by u/HooverInstitution on r/ArtificialInteligence