Former President Donald Trump has called the rise of China's DeepSeek AI chatbot a wake-up call for US tech giants. DeepSeek's R1 model, built at a fraction of the cost of competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT, has already made waves, overtaking ChatGPT in app store downloads. This disruption led to a $1 trillion drop in the value of leading US tech companies, with Nvidia losing a record $600 billion in a single day. Trump sees DeepSeek's cost-effective AI as a threat to US dominance in the field and believes it should push US firms to up their game. While Sam Altman of OpenAI acknowledged the competition, he remains confident that his company will push out even better models. The DeepSeek effect has spread beyond the US, impacting tech stocks in other parts of the world.
Could this Chinese breakthrough mark the beginning of a new AI era?