The global artificial intelligence community’s attention was recently focused on DeepSeek’s latest open-source model, Math-V2, the first open-source AI model to score a gold medal-level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad. But while California might hone in on the test scores, Jakarta and Nairobi are looking at something else entirely.
For the Global South, the critical question is more likely to be whether that reasoning capability can optimise fertiliser distribution in a drought or balance a fragile power grid.
As nations in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America increasingly integrate Chinese AI into their technology, Western observers often characterise this trend as a simple search for bargain-bin prices or a disregard for data privacy. This view is reductive.
The Global South’s embrace of Chinese AI is not merely economic; it is civilisational. It stems from a profound philosophical alignment between China’s “material pragmatism” – a focus on tangible utility – and the indigenous values of developing nations.
At the heart of China’s technological approach lies the ancient concept of dao-qi unity. In this philosophical tradition, the dao or the Way – abstract principles, logic or wisdom – cannot be separated from the qi, or vessel: the physical world and the tangible instruments in it. Technology is not viewed as a mere tool severed from high truth, but as the necessary embodiment of it.
This stands in contrast to the Silicon Valley ethos, which often prioritises AI as a “brain in a jar” – a disembodied superintelligence designed to generate text or video. The Chinese approach, forged in the fires of domestic industrial competition, views AI as “relational infrastructure”: a connective tissue for physical systems. It is designed to get its hands dirty.