DeepSeek researcher warns AI could wipe out jobs in 10 years — and tech companies should be 'guardians of humanity' (www.businessinsider.com)

At a rare public appearance at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, DeepSeek senior researcher Chen Deli warned that AI could eliminate most jobs within 10–20 years and urged tech companies to act as “guardians of humanity,” prioritizing safety and helping reshape societal order. Chen framed the near term as a “honeymoon phase,” when AI still augments human work and boosts productivity, but predicted that over the next 5–10 years systems will become powerful enough to force widespread workforce disruption. He urged firms to sound the alarm now — serving as whistleblowers about potential risks rather than only celebrating gains. Chen’s remarks carry extra weight because DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model, unveiled earlier this year, demonstrated top-tier performance at a fraction of competitors’ costs, making large-scale deployment more feasible. The exchange also underscores the intensifying US–China AI race: OpenAI’s March letter and its later GPT-oss release (open-weight models) signal responses to competitive pressure from inexpensive, high-performance Chinese models. Technically, cheaper, capable reasoning models plus an open-source ecosystem could accelerate automation across industries, shifting foundational model selection globally. The takeaways: rapid capability gains heighten the need for governance, workforce transition planning, and industry-led safety commitments to manage societal disruption.