Trump Reacts as China Startup DeepSeek Challenges ChatGPT
Trump hoped that the launch of DeepSeek will force the Silicon Valley outfits to develop AI platforms economically in order to survive in the fledgling AI market.
By Rakesh Raman
U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed his disquiet over the rising popularity of a new low-cost Chinese AI model DeepSeek which has challenged the dominance of ChatGPT in the emerging chatbot market.
DeepSeek, a small startup founded in 2023, develops open-source large language models (LLMs) that deliver human-like responses to user queries with a frontend chatbot. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot is by far supposed to be the most popular chatbot, although it is not yet stable.
Trump said on January 27 that the emergence of DeepSeek – which sent U.S. tech shares tumbling – should be a “wake up call” for U.S. firms which are spending huge money on developing their AI models.
In fact, a few days ago, Trump himself announced an ambitious $500-billion AI project named Stargate, which is supported by Sam Altman, founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
Trump hoped that the launch of DeepSeek will force the Silicon Valley outfits to develop AI platforms economically in order to survive in the fledgling AI market.
The DeepSeek chatbot has been developed by a startup based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou at a fraction of the money being invested by the American companies on their AI developments.
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A few days ago, DeepSeek released a comprehensive research paper to describe that its DeepSeek-R1 models leverage the reasoning capabilities in large language models or LLMs through Reinforcement Learning.
Last week, DeepSeek’s AI assistant climbed to the top of Apple Inc.’s iPhone download charts and ranked among the top downloads on Google’s Play Store.
As a result of this sudden surge, the startup’s backend tech gear crumbled under the user request load and its chatbot service remained unavailable for over an hour. Subsequently, the company claimed that the break in service was because of large-scale malicious attacks which forced it to restrict the signups to users who had mainland China telephone numbers.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society.
