Trump calls DeepSeek a wake-up call for U.S. tech companies
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has captured the tech world's attention in a way we haven't seen since ChatGPT and now, Donald Trump's got something to say about it, too.
"The release of DeepSeek, 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," said the president, addressing House Republicans in Miami on Monday.
The comments come after a red day in the U.S. stock market, in which Nvidia shed more than $500 billion in market cap on fears that DeepSeek's optimized approach to AI will reduced demand for Nvidia hardware.
DeepSeek R1 is the latest LLM from Chinese AI company DeepSeek. It wins over competitors, including OpenAI's most powerful models, in benchmarks, while requiring less computing power for training. It's cheaper to use than OpenAI's models, and it's open-source, making it easy for any tech company to use, repurpose, and modify as they see feet. Read our detailed overview of DeepSeek R1 on Mashable.
While there are still a lot of unknowns about DeepSeek R1 and the company that built it, numerous U.S. tech leaders praised its efficiency and the fact that it's open-source. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft's Satya Nadella called DeepSeek R1 "super impressive," while investor Marc Andreessen called DeepSeek "one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs" he'd ever seen.
UPDATE: Jan. 28, 2025, 3:02 p.m. CET OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also chimed in with his opinion on DeepSeek early on Tuesday. "deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases," he wrote on X.
The impact that DeepSeek had on the U.S. stock market immediately raised question on how the Trump administration will handle the news, including the possibility of outright banning it in the U.S.
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So far, however, it appears that Trump is seeing it as healthy competition rather than a threat to U.S. companies.