Thomas Edison, the autodidactic telegraph operator turned entrepreneur, is often considered the greatest inventor of all time, while Nikola Tesla, who worked for an Edison company in Paris before emigrating to the United States, is barely remembered, except through Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company. Yet it was Tesla’s breakthrough with alternating current (AC), not Edison’s direct current (DC) technology, that made mass electrification affordable. The prohibitive costs of DC would have kept Edison’s urban electrification a plaything of the rich, like many of his other inventions.Could the Chinese investor Liang Wenfeng’s DeepSeek AI models represent a similar breakthrough in AI, or are they scams like cold fusion and room-temperature superconductivity? And if they are confirmed, should the US treat them as a mortal threat, or as a gift to the world?
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