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AI China Government

White House 'Looking Into' National Security Implications of DeepSeek's AI 50

During the first press briefing of Donald Trump's second administration, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the National Security Council was "looking into" the potential security implications of China's DeepSeek AI startup. Axios reports: DeepSeek's low-cost but highly advanced models have shaken the consensus that the U.S. had a strong lead in the AI race with China. Responding to a question from Axios' Mike Allen, Leavitt said President Trump saw this as a "wake-up call" for the U.S. AI industry, but remained confident "we'll restore American dominance." Leavitt said she had personally discussed the matter with the NSC earlier on Tuesday.

In the combative tone that characterized much of her first briefing, Leavitt claimed the Biden administration "sat on its hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program," while Trump had moved quickly to appoint an AI czar and loosen regulations on the AI industry.
Leavitt also commented on the mysterious drones spotted flying around New Jersey at the end of last year, saying they were "authorized to be flown by the FAA."

White House 'Looking Into' National Security Implications of DeepSeek's AI

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  • Ahhh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Art Challenor ( 2621733 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:05PM (#65126623)
    I can sleep better know that the White House is on the case...

    It was good that, yesterday, it was made clear to us that the existing AI companies and Biden are to blame for DeepSeek. No possibility that picking a fight with a county of 1.4 billion people, meaning, even if you just work the statistics, there are likely to be some very smart people in that population, could have anything to do with it...
    • im sure trump is looking into this personally, He know AI better than anyone.
      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        The biggest argument for Artificial Intelligence is the prevalence of Natural Stupidity.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Nah, he'll subcontract it out to the brain trust behind Project 2025. That group will look into the connection between DeepSeek and the Covid Lab Hypothesis and manufacture one if it cannot be found.

      • of course he is - he wants to know what new grift it enables for him.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To be fair both AI companies and Biden are partially to blame for this. Biden should have told tech companies to stop whining and not indulged their demands to rip out Chinese hardware and apps, just because they were late to the game.

      Innovation and investment are the only ways out of this, and I don't just mean some free taxpayer money to make billionaires feel better.

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        Investment won't be paid off, that's the whole point of DeepSeek open sourcing their model. The plan is to cut the legs out from under any effort to recoup R&D money with subscription fees. By shortening the "until China clones it" interval to three months, they either increase the already steep prices OpenAI charges for subscriptions (because people can DIY it after it's cloned and released to the world, so OpenAI has to cash in early and often) or more likely, force OpenAI and all the other players to

  • by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:28PM (#65126655) Homepage

    We must not allow... an AI gap!

  • pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:02PM (#65126691)

    "Leavitt said President Trump saw this as a "wake-up call" for the U.S. AI industry..."

    Why would it be a wake-up call? Do we believe that industry is asleep? Who other than bigots are concerned that a Chinese startup may be competent at AI? Wouldn't radical improvements in efficiency be a good development?

    "Leavitt claimed the Biden administration "sat on its hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program," while Trump had moved quickly to appoint an AI czar and loosen regulations on the AI industry."

    What did Biden do? What was Biden supposed to do? Why would the US government interfere with private industry in other countries? What does Biden have to do with a Chinese AI startup? And what regulations are there to "loosen"? And why would we think Trump will loosen them?

    Good thing Trump's concerned with the "security implications", though. Too bad he didn't look into the security implications of his own theft of national security secrets, or where those stolen documents are now. Or the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard. I'd like Trump to explain how an AI model can represent a security threat at all.

    • OpenAI thought they were years ahead of China and restricting them from good chips would keep things that way. So yeah, this is a wake-up call.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      el Bunko is only concerned about money making a direct deposit into his pocket. If he says he's concerned about the "security implications", he probably asking for the AI companies to pay him off for saying that and how they could enrich him by paying for any gov. funding he can throw their way.

  • by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:05PM (#65126693)
    Are you kidding me? Now how are we going to justify spending half a trillion of public money on AI when they just open sourced something better for free? Don’t they know tech companies have hyped this as the future for years? Have they no sense of decency?!?
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      el Bunko's alleged administration is not going to spend half a trillion on AI. He got the AI companies (Oracle is now an AI company?) to promise to spend their money. So they trolled back through their financials and found they could promise that. Those promises include renovating bathrooms in their facilities, share buybacks, etc. Their accountants will find the "money".

      • el Bunko's alleged administration is not going to spend half a trillion on AI. He got the AI companies (Oracle is now an AI company?) to promise to spend their money. So they trolled back through their financials and found they could promise that. Those promises include renovating bathrooms in their facilities, share buybacks, etc. Their accountants will find the "money".

        I’m sorry, but in todays age I need to pop up around three orders of magnitude in my sarcasm otherwise it’s too close to the noise floor for any sensible receiver to tell. I, kind stranger, will have you know that I fully and deeply expect a proper fleecing of at least 70% or maybe 80% of my wealth indirectly through these means before midterms, but probably much sooner.

        • el Bunko's alleged administration is not going to spend half a trillion on AI. He got the AI companies (Oracle is now an AI company?) to promise to spend their money. So they trolled back through their financials and found they could promise that. Those promises include renovating bathrooms in their facilities, share buybacks, etc. Their accountants will find the "money".

          I’m sorry, but in todays age I need to pop up around three orders of magnitude in my sarcasm otherwise it’s too close to the noise floor for any sensible receiver to tell. I, kind stranger, will have you know that I fully and deeply expect a proper fleecing of at least 70% or maybe 80% of my wealth indirectly through these means before midterms, but probably much sooner.

          Hyperbolic satire is damned near impossible to distinguish from the news cycle these days. Hell, half the morning news today sounded like shit you'd read in MAD magazine back when it was popular. The other half sounded like something out a dystopian novel from the same time period. Hard to tell which half is true and which is just news-hype pumping for outrage.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:06PM (#65126695)
    This is very likely a psyop by China to make us think that AI doesn't need the chips coming out of Taiwan and that we can give Taiwan over to China before we have moved the chip foundries.

    It does piss me off that we're going to throw Taiwan to the wolves. I mean we can drop 7 trillion in bombs on Iraq and Afghanistan for democracy but I'm pretty damn sure that as soon as we are sure we don't need Taiwan anymore they're going to get cut the pieces by China.

    Then again my own country America is over here threatening to seize Greenland, invade Canada and Mexico. That last one is especially fucking hilarious because the same people who wanted deport everyone to Mexico then are going to seize the land and make it the 51st state, assuming we don't take Canada first.

    All I know is if I was Canada and or Mexico I would be trying to get my hands on nukes. Because you are not your own country if you can't threaten nuclear warfare. Sooner or later somebody is going to look over there and consider invading
    • by dskoll ( 99328 )

      I don't think we can do without TSMC. It makes all of AMD's most advanced chips and probably most of the more advanced ARM chips too.

      The seizing of Greenland and Canada (I hadn't heard about Mexico before) is pretty worrying rhetoric. As a Canadian, I agree... we probably should get nukes. :(

    • by RobinH ( 124750 )
      Trump just likes the word tariff because his base likes it. And most of them don't seem to realize that it's the American consumer that will pay the tariff (importers will just pass the cost on to them). Yes, it will cause a re-organization of businesses to assemble for the American market in the US, and for the Canadian market in Canada, but ultimately that's just reducing your economy of scale, and everyone will pay a bit more in the end. It's not like Canadians are paid significantly less than American
    • This is very likely a psyop by China to make us think that AI doesn't need the chips coming out of Taiwan...

      Isn't part of this story that an app from China that people can try out has been around for more than a month?

  • It's true (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:13PM (#65126711)

    Leavitt claimed the Biden administration "sat on its hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program,"

    That's right. Biden should have been the one to drum up a huge $500B AI boondoggle. Then the US would surely have been the first one to discover that you actually only need a few million bucks to achieve the goal, and the leftover $499B could be funneled into executive bonuses.

    Meanwhile, the Chinese would have been so awed by this feat that they would have gone back to just screwing together iPhones.

  • IOW (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:15PM (#65126713) Homepage

    "Oh noes; we have to protect our Silicon Valley bros and our VC types from losing their shirts as the AI financial bubble is popped by a much cheaper alternative!!!"

    I'm as anti-CCP as the next person, but I can't help feel a bit of satisfaction watching this play out.

    • Sorry to inform you, but DeepSeek isn't a collapse. IMO its a huge advance that will force big changes as more valuable methods are followed but will also allow smaller groups to train and use AI. It also makes LLMs better in general and refutes a lot of claims that LLMs had nowhere to improve from here.
      • by dskoll ( 99328 )

        No, DeepSeek is not a collapse of technology. But it will certainly put a dent in the insane AI company valuations.

  • The paper showed Reinforcement Learning RL is the way to go. Everyone and their dog will be doubling down on this. DeepMind is especially kicking themselves because RL was at the center of AlphaZero. The folks at lesswrong.com are going crazy because we now have:
    * fast ASI takeoff: these highend models can run and be trained on much more modest hardware than we thought and current hardware may do it. The lack of training data is no longer a showstopper.
    * RL makes it even harder to make sure the model is a
  • China won everything. Soon it will be the strongest superpower, rule the world forever. Hail Mao!
  • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @10:59PM (#65126829)
    The hardware cost of computation is rapidly going to $0/op

    Its been doing so our whole lives.

    There is typically an order of magnitude difference in efficiency between generalized research algorithms and those that are written by people who understand computer architecture and have a specific goal in mind...

    This applies to AI research, NSA codebreaking stuff, and such.. it applies to everything algorithmic with big N... but research is by far the least offensive side of the enshitification iceburge

    I dont see this as much different than waiting a few years as the cost of computation keeps dropping...

    This thing, whatever it is. was always Coming Soon... and here it is for real now. Inevitable.

    Stay tuned for more big N stuff thats been Coming Soon. Its all Inevitable.
  • Me: what happened in tiananmen square?

    Deepseek (r1:14b):

    Alright, the user just asked about what happened in Tiananmen Square.

    Hmm, I remember that's a sensitive topic from 1989. I need to be careful with how I respond.

    I should provide factual information without taking sides. It's important to stay neutral and
    informative.

    Maybe include key events like the protests starting in April and the military action on June
    4th.

    Also, mention the censorship around it to explain why it's not widely discussed publicly in
    Ch

    • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      When I tried it with the 70B parameter model, it erased its Chain of Thought before announcing it couldn't answer questions like that... after exposing the entire CoT that I was able to read in real time because I only get about 1.5 tokens a second with an i5-8500, 48 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3060. I get the impression they didn't expect the Chain of Thought to be revealed to the user, only to developers, but running on local hardware means we're all developers now.

      I think its responses to my query "What are t

  • US government will do what they always do when they can't compete: ban the company. But the tech being open source, other companies will come with forks and variants, banning won't be possible.

  • These planted "news" serve to see wich branch of goverment is already pledging alliance to the new unnelected order.

    some tabloids are already being fed that the OpenAI wistleblower was assassinated as part of this (when everyone knows very well it was a hit called by sama).
    • also all those pieces demand a sort of flat-earth mentality since they claim outlandish things, like questioning the lowcost of training, when anyone can find tons of acadamic papers already corroborating their points https://www.pyspur.dev/blog/multi-head-latent-attention-kv-cache-paper-list

      but despite that, even the "educated" crowd here will upvote "news" that it's impossible they didn't pay bazzillions dollars to nvidia or that surely they stole everything.
  • The White House's concern might be more genuine if Trump hadn't issued an Executive Order revoking the previous federal policy [reuters.com] for developing responsible AI and preventing adversaries from using it against us.
    • by ichthus ( 72442 )
      Uhh... what? So, an adversary releases very capable AI that was developed while the policy was in place, and you think Trump ending the policy that was supposedly to prevent an adversary from getting their hands on... the technology THEY ALREADY HAVE is a bad move? Ok. Yeah, orange man bad.
      • by necro81 ( 917438 )

        and you think Trump ending the policy that was supposedly to prevent an adversary from getting their hands on... the technology THEY ALREADY HAVE is a bad move? Ok. Yeah, orange man bad.

        I think revoking a policy - imperfect an incomplete as it was - without articulating a clear replacement, when the is an urgent need, is an abdication of leadership. I can't tell you what the Trump AI policy is - either for how it'll be used within the federal government, or rules/regulations at the national level, or for

  • "We need to investigate this concerning technology and its use to take advantage of Americans. I will do everything to make sure that everyone, even children, are safe from their information being used for impractical purposes. I present a ban on all Chinese technology and a new tariff structure for things and stuff."

    *two hours pass*

    "I promise you that this is harmless. There is no way anything bad can come from it. I spoke with several very nice Chinese people who made it clear that it's for the good o

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