MIAMI: US President Donald Trump said on Monday that Chinese startup 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 wakeup 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 artificial intelligence 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 United States 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.
Trump also told reporters on Monday that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. TikTok, which has about 170 million American users, was briefly taken offline just before a law requiring its Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban took effect on Jan 19.
Trump, after taking office on Jan 20, signed an executive order seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of the law. Trump said last week that he was in talks with multiple people over buying TikTok and would likely have a decision on the popular app’s future in 30 days. The US president has previously said that he was open to billionaire Elon Musk buying the social media app if the Tesla CEO wanted to do so. Musk, however, has not publicly commented on Trump’s offer.
More recently, AI startup Perplexity AI on Sunday made a proposal to merge with TikTok, with the US government getting up to half of the new company in future, a source told Reuters. The reported talks mark the second time that Microsoft has been in the frame to acquire TikTok. During his first term, Trump ordered TikTok to separate its US version from ByteDance citing national security concerns.
Microsoft emerged as a top bidder in 2020, but the talks soon collapsed, and Trump’s divestment push ended a few months later when he left office. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called that deal the “strangest thing I’ve ever worked on”. The US government had a “particular set of requirements and then it just disappeared,” he said in 2021. – Reuters