Author:
Matsas Savvas M.
National University of Athens (Greece, Athens)
Abstract:
The recent tremendous high technology advances in Artificial Intelligence have produced great expectations as well as illusions in today’s world in a protracted deep global crisis. The moment of truth came at the end of January 2025, soon after the inauguration of Donald Trump as US President for a second term. An enormous shock in the US, the West and all over the world was produced by the unexpected news that a small start-up Chinese company, DeepSeek, had launched a very low-cost open-source Long Language Model (LLM) of generative AI, the R1. It has a comparable performance with the incomparably more expensive, not open-source model Open AI’s Chat GPT, launched in November 2022, and advertised as the “pioneer of the new era of generative AI”. The event was aptly defined by M. Andreessen as “a new Sputnik moment”. As during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was able, in October 1957, to make the first advanced step at the race to the outer space by launching the first artificial satellite Sputnik, China, amid growing geopolitical tensions, in 2025 has made an important leap forward for AI high technological progress, in advance from US. The causes have to be traced at the opposite strategic orientation of the high-tech sector in the respective countries determined by their different social formations, social structures. The repercussions of this “new Sputnik moment” continue to develop. The scientific-technological, social, economic-political and geopolitical implications are enormous. To explore them, important methodological guidelines can be provided by a new reading of the Marx’ s concept of the General Intellect in Grundrisse in its relation to the law of value as well contributions in the field of research opened by noonomy.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence Technology, DeepSeek, General Intellect, Grundrisse, Noonomy
For citation:Matsas S.M. (2025). The Scientific-Technological Progress of AI, General Intellect, and the New Sputnik Moment. Noonomy and Noosociety. Almanac of Scientific Works of the S.Y. Witte INID, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 43–53. DOI: 10.37930/2782-6465-2025-4-2-43-53