The launch of Chinese AI DeepSeek has prompted a wide range of responses from Silicon Valley, with many considering the competition a threat to U.S. control over the industry.
Newsweek reached out to DeepSeek and the White House for comment via email.
Why It Matters
The launch of DeepSeek has been described as a "Sputnik moment" that could prompt a more aggressive artificial intelligence policy from the U.S., which has attempted to retain its dominance in international AI advances. The reaction of Silicon Valley, home to the largest players in the industry, will be critical in deciding how the U.S. responds to DeepSeek.
What To Know
The biggest names in the U.S. AI industry have issued a wide range of responses, with some dismissing DeepSeek as a minor issue, while others consider it an extreme shake-up to the AI status quo.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is closely intertwined with President Donald Trump's technology policy, questioned DeepSeek's claims that it was able to train its model using only 2,000 specialized chips from NVIDIA, which is around 1/50th of the resources used by ChatGPT.
Musk replied to a clip of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who said that DeepSeek has around 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that it cannot discuss due to U.S. export controls, writing the response: "Obviously."
Musk's former colleague-turned-rival Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, took a more serious tone in his response, saying that DeepSeek was "an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price."
Altman, whose flagship product ChatGPT is described by DeepSeek as a "rival," said in a statement: "We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases. But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research road map and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission."
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also took a serious approach to the launch, describing DeepSeek as a "turning point" in a Washington Post op-ed, and that U.S. approaches to development would change as a result of DeepSeek's open-source approach.
"America's competitive edge has long relied on open science and collaboration across industry, academia and government," Schmidt wrote.
"We should embrace the possibility that open science might once again fuel American dynamism in the age of AI."
Fortune reported that Mark Zuckerberg had assembled a "war room" of Meta's AI engineers to flesh out a response to DeepSeek, with the company being described as on "high alert."
What People Are Saying
President Donald Trump said on Monday: "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."
What Happens Next
DeepSeek's full ramifications on U.S. AI have yet to be seen, with the White House expected to take a new approach to AI development.
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