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The release of DeepSeek-R1, a new open-source reasoning model from a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, should be a “wake-up call” for the U.S. tech industry, President Donald Trump said.
While speaking at a gathering of House Republican lawmakers on Monday night in Miami, Trump called for American tech companies to be “laser-focused” on competing with rivals like DeepSeek.
“When you hear a DeepSeek, when you hear somebody — somebody come up with something, we always have the ideas. We’re always first,” Trump said at the event. “So, I would say that’s a positive... instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with hopefully the same solution.”
DeepSeek in December released a model that it said cost just $5.6 million to train and develop on Nvidia (NVDA-5.05%) H800 chips, which have reduced capabilities compared to chips used by U.S. firms. Meanwhile, U.S. rivals such as OpenAI and Meta have touted spending tens of billions on cutting-edge chips from Nvidia.
The release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked a global sell-off of tech stocks on Monday. DeepSeek also published a new set of AI models that the company said can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion Xl. DeepSeek’s Janus-Pro model family is published under a license that allows it to be used commercially without restrictions.
Last week, Trump invited executives at OpenAI, Japanese investment bank SoftBank (SFTBY-0.93%), and software company Oracle (ORCL-0.99%) to the White House to announce Stargate, a joint venture that plans to invest $500 billion into AI infrastructure over the next four years. The project is planned to exclusively serve OpenAI, The Financial Times reported.
Through a sweeping executive order, Trump has also revoked his predecessor’s 2023 executive order on AI safety and security, which was praised by a trade group representing U.S. tech companies, including Amazon (AMZN-0.33%) and Google (GOOGL+0.33%). He also signed a new order directing a group of White House tech and science officials to develop a new AI action plan within 180 days.
“DeepSeek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive and that President Trump was right to rescind the Biden EO, which hamstrung American AI companies without asking whether China would do the same,” David Sacks, a venture capitalist and top Trump advisor on cryptocurrency and AI, wrote on X.
“I’m confident in the U.S. but we can’t be complacent,” he added.
—Britney Nguyen contributed to this article.