President Trump said Monday that DeepSeek, a Chinese startup behind a popular new artificial intelligence (AI) model, represented a “wake-up call” for American tech firms.
“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 told House Republicans at their annual policy retreat.
The president also suggested that the rise of the new AI model, which contributed to significant stock losses for the tech sector Monday, could be seen as a positive.
“That could be very much a positive development,” he added during the address at his National Doral resort outside Miami. “So instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution.”
DeepSeek exploded onto the AI scene last week after releasing its R1 open-source reasoning model, which it claims performs on par with OpenAI’s models. It surged to the top of Apple’s App Store over the weekend, overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Most notable about the AI model, however, is how it was built. DeepSeek claims to have spent just $5.6 million and relied on a couple thousand reduced-capability chips to train its latest models.
This threatens to upend the current consensus on developing AI, which assumed massive investment in data centers and chips was necessary to train new models. American tech firms, like OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, have committed billions of dollars to building out AI infrastructure in recent years.
The revelation sent tech stocks tumbling Monday, with AI chipmaker Nvidia losing nearly $600 billion in value in one day.
Brett Samuels contributed to this report.
