US President Donald Trump said Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s technology should act as spur for American companies and said it was good that companies in China have come up with a cheaper, faster method of artificial intelligence.
“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,” Trump said in Florida.
Investors sold technology stocks across the globe on Monday over concerns the emergence of a low-cost Chinese AI model would threaten the dominance of the current US-based AI leaders.
“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, and that’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset,” Trump said.
“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, hopefully,” he said.
Trump said Chinese leaders had told him the US had the most brilliant scientists in the world, and he indicated that if Chinese industry could come up with cheaper AI technology, US companies would follow.
“We always have the ideas. We’re always first. So, I would say that’s a positive that could be very much a positive development. So instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution,” Trump said.
Sam Altman reacts
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, has called DeepSeek’s R1 AI model “impressive” but emphasised that OpenAI believes greater computing power was key to their own success.
DeepSeek grabbed global attention last month when it stated in a paper that training its DeepSeek-V3 model required less than US$6-million in computing power using the lower-capability Nvidia H800 chips.
Read: Chinese OpenAI rival DeepSeek tops iPhone download charts
DeepSeek-R1, launched last week, is 20-50x more affordable to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek’s official WeChat account. “DeepSeek’s R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” Altman said on X.
“But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research road map and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission,” Altman added.
DeepSeek’s emergence has raised doubts about the reasoning behind some US tech companies’ decision to pledge billions of dollars in AI investment, and shares of several big tech players, including Nvidia, have been hit.
Nvidia saw a record one-day loss of $593-billion in market value on Monday, marking the largest single-day loss for any company on Wall Street. — Nandita Bose, with Jeff Mason, Ryan Jones and Harshita Meenaktshi, (c) 2025 Reuters
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