Donald Trump eerily warns AI startup DeepSeek should be 'wakeup call' for America's AI industry

As the President of the United States, Donald Trump is one of the most powerful men in the world.

No matter your political allegiances or what you think of the former host of The Apprentice, his return to the White House puts him in a position of power where everyone is paying attention to him.

Now, the POTUS has warned about the emergence of China's DeepSeek AI and what it could mean for the future of artificial intelligence.

Despite being the oldest President ever to serve, Trump has shown himself to be unexpectedly tech-savvy.

He might've had early reservations about cryptocurrency and tried to ban TikTok in his first term, but now he's back to ordering Diet Coke at the press of the button, he's paving the way for a tech-first America.

Alongside being heralded as the 'savior' of TikTok, Trump released his own meme coin just days before returning to office.

Everyone likes to save a dollar here and there, so with China offering its own low-cost alternative to America's AI, Trump has warned it should be a 'wakeup call' for The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

DeepSeek is a Chinese startup that spectacularly claims its R1 model has power similar to Sam Altman's OpenAI.

Although OpenAI is said to currently lag behind ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in terms of power, DeepSeek's ability to undercut its American cousins has already led to a market crash.

Chip maker Nvidia recorded a record-breaking one-day loss on Wall Street - having just wiped $600 billion off its market value.

Instead of being worried about this historic slump, President Trump sees this as the kick up the backside Silicon Valley could need. Speaking in Florida, Trump said: "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."

Highlighting how DeepSeek can be cheaper because it uses less processing power, he added: "I view that as a positive, as an asset... you won't be spending as much, and you'll get the same result, hopefully."

Still, DeepSeek has already taken the crown as the USA's most downloaded free app in just a week since it was launched.

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, with claims it was trained for around $6 million. This is something that others will dispute, but either way, it looks like it cost a fraction of its US counterparts.

These are sure to be worrying times for the AI industry, especially after Trump gathered the likes of Altman to launch his $500 billion Stargate project that's focused on AI.

Across the board, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta platforms, Microsoft, and Alphabet joined Nvidia by taking a hit to their market values. With fears that the past two years of an AI frenzy have led to overinflated market values, analysts recorded a combined US tech loss of well over $1 trillion in a single day.

We're already seeing DeepSeek's potential positives. Altman posted on X and congratulated his AI rival but promised OpenAI would do better: "DeepSeek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price.

"We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases."