Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, expressed concerns over China's development and release of DeepSeek, a new AI platform akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He described it as "deeply alarming" in a post on X dated January 28.
"China's AI advancements should be deeply alarming for every American," said Pompeo. "Any data that you provide to a Chinese-owned app like DeepSeek can be turned over to the Chinese Communist Party. The Biden Administration didn't take this threat seriously—I'm hopeful this Administration will act to keep Americans safe."
According to NBC News, President Trump said that the emergence of the Chinese AI app DeepSeek should serve as a "wake-up call" for American tech companies. The AI model reportedly censors certain topics, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Screenshot of Post on X
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The Financial Times reports that DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup responsible for creating an advanced open-source reasoning model named DeepSeek-R1. This model competes with leading Western AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek has attracted attention for its innovative and cost-effective approach to AI development. The release of DeepSeek-R1 signifies China's rapid progress in artificial intelligence, posing a challenge to the dominance of U.S. tech companies in this sector.
Reuters indicates that the launch of DeepSeek resulted in a $593 billion market value loss for chipmaker Nvidia in just one day. The free AI model claims to utilize less data at lower costs compared to incumbent services and is reported to be 20 to 50 times cheaper than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task. It recently surpassed the U.S. AI app ChatGPT in downloads on Apple’s app store.
David Sacks, recently appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar, suggested that DeepSeek may have improved its models using those developed by OpenAI through a process known as knowledge distillation, according to the BBC.
Michael R. Pompeo served as the 70th Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021 and was previously Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2017 to 2018, as noted by the State Department.
