DeepSeek Should Be A Wake-up Call For Our AI Industry: US President Donald Trump

DeepSeek hasn’t only got the financial markets and AI companies to scramble, but it’s also caught the attention of the US President.

US President Donald Trump has said that Chinese AI company DeepSeek was a wake-up call for the US AI industry. He however said that a capable model being able to provide its services for much cheaper than US models was a net positive.

“ Last week, I signed an order revoking Joe Biden’s destructive artificial intelligence regulations so that AI companies could once again focused on being the best, not just being the most woken today,” Trump said at an event. “And over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular, coming up with a faster method of AI and much less expensive method,” he added.

“And that’s good because you don’t have to spend this much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset. I really think if it’s fact and if it’s true — and nobody really knows if it is — but I view that as a positive because you’ll be doing that too. So you won’t be spending as much and you’ll get the same result,” he added.

“Hopefully the release of deep seek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win because we have the greatest scientists in the world. Even Chinese leadership told me that they said you have the most brilliant scientists in the world…they said there’s nobody like those people,” he added.

“This is very unusual when you hear a DeepSeek when you hear something, somebody come up with something. We always have the ideas — we are always first. So I would say that’s a positive. That could be very much a positive developments. Instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less and you’ll come up with hopefully the same solution under the Trump administration. We’re going to unleash our tech companies and we’re going to dominate the future like never before,” he added.

Trump is the first world leader to speak on DeepSeek, whose R1 model was released by the company last week, and displayed abilities similar to OpenAI’s cutting-edge o1 model, but at a fraction of the cost. This caused a selloff in many US-based AI stocks, and NVIDIA saw $650 billion of its value wiped out in a single day. Trump seems to be aware of the development — and while he’s said that DeepSeek’s development is a net positive, he has said that the US needs to get its act together and compete with a very credible adversary that’s emerging in the form of China.

Posted in AI