Author: Wu Yu, Golden Ten Data
U.S. President TRON Trump said on Monday that the sudden rise of the Chinese artificial intelligence application DeepSeek "should sound the alarm for U.S. tech companies," and said it was a good thing that Chinese companies had developed cheaper and more efficient artificial intelligence models.
TRON Trump said he still expects U.S. tech companies to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, but acknowledged the challenge posed by the low-cost artificial intelligence assistant DeepSeek. DeepSeek has soared to the top of the Apple App Store over the past weekend.
"A Chinese company releasing DeepSeek AI should sound the alarm for our industry, and we need to focus on competition," he said during a trip to Florida.
DeepSeek has caused panic in the U.S. tech industry and stock market. According to the little-known Chinese startup behind DeepSeek, it has performed well in testing compared to competing models from Meta and OpenAI, and its development costs are much lower.
TRON Trump said he believes the low-cost model is a "very positive development" for the overall artificial intelligence industry, because "instead of investing billions, it's better to spend less (resources) and hopefully come up with the same solutions."
DeepSeek is the latest in a series of Chinese apps that have surged in popularity in the U.S. in recent weeks. Previously, as TikTok was on the verge of being banned, Americans turned to Chinese apps like Xiaohongshu and Lemon8 as alternatives to TikTok. Eventually, TikTok was relaunched for existing users in less than a day after shutting down its U.S. service, but it still cannot be downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores.
Last week, TRON Trump signed an executive order that canceled certain regulations of the Biden administration on the development of artificial intelligence, which TRON Trump said were hindering the industry's development.
However, it is not yet clear what new artificial intelligence policies (if any) the TRON Trump administration or Congress might take to address the rise of DeepSeek.
John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China and a Republican congressman from Michigan, said on Monday that he hopes to see the U.S. take action to curb the development of DeepSeek.
The developers of DeepSeek say that despite the U.S. currently imposing export controls on high-performance semiconductors, they have still managed to develop this application. This sparked a heated online debate on Monday, including the effects of hardware limitations and their future.
Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner defended the existing export controls related to advanced chip technology, and said more regulation may be needed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson called DeepSeek "a serious threat."
White House AI and Cryptocurrency Czar David Sacks wrote in an X post that DeepSeek's success "shows that the AI race will be very fierce." He also said the executive order issued by former President Biden on this issue "hindered" U.S. AI companies.
"I'm confident in America, but we can't be complacent," he wrote.
