WASHINGTON, 28 JAN

President Donald Trump has said that the sudden rise of the Chinese app DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call” for American companies developing artificial intelligence as they need to be laser-focused on competing to win.

DeepSeek says its artificial intelligence models are comparable with those from US giants, like OpenAI which is behind ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, but potentially a fraction of the cost.

Trump also mentioned that DeepSeek is a positive development as it’s cheaper.

"Today and over the last couple of days, 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 a much less expensive method. That's good because you don't have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive as an asset," Trump told House Republicans on Monday at a Florida retreat, the first after he became the president.

"So, I really think if it's fact and if it's true and nobody really knows if it is, but 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," he said and quickly added a word of caution to the US tech companies.

"Hopefully, the release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win because we have the greatest scientists in the world. Even the Chinese leadership told me that," Trump said.

"They said you have the most brilliant scientists in the world and Seattle and various places, but Silicon Valley. They said there's nobody like those people. This is very unusual. When you hear a DeepSeek, when you hear somebody come up with something, we always have the ideas," he said.

"We're always first. I would say that's a positive that could be very much a positive development instead of spending billions and billions, you'll spend less and you'll come up with hopefully the same solution," Trump said.

Later in an interaction with reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he is not concerned about Chinese dominance in the tech sector.

"We are gonna dominate. We'll dominate everything," he said.

"Are we at risk of losing AI supremacy?" Trump was asked.

"There's a different way of doing something. Other people are going to be announcing various AI solutions as soon as next week, from what I understand, which will top that one. So, we're going to see. Look, it's a very new world, in that sense. This is very complex stuff. Frankly, if you could do it cheaper if you can do it unless we get to the same end result. I think that's a good thing for us," Trump said in response.