Cryptocurrency czar David Sacks on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s reversal of a Biden-era executive order that instituted guardrails on artificial intelligence technology but “hamstrung” American AI companies.
Sacks cited DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that that develops open-source large language models (LLMs). The company has been outperforming American AI companies like OpenAI and Meta.
The company recently unveiled R1, a specialized model designed for complex problem-solving, on Jan. 20, which “zoomed to the global top 10 in performance,” and was built far more rapidly, with fewer, less powerful AI chips, at a much lower cost than other U.S. models, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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In a post on X, Sacks said DeepSeek R1 proves that the AI race “will be very competitive” and that Trump was “right to rescind the Biden EO.”
He said the order “hamstrung American AI companies without asking whether China would do the same. (Obviously not.) I’m confident in the U.S. but we can’t be complacent.”
Hours after returning to the White House, Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order, which set in motion a sprint across government agencies to study AI’s impact on everything from cybersecurity risks to its effects on education, workplaces and public benefits.
Trump said the order acted as a barrier to American AI innovation.
“We must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” Trump’s order says. It also “established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.”
In a policy directive last year, the Biden administration said federal agencies must show their artificial intelligence tools aren’t harming the public, or stop using them. Trump’s order directs the White House to revise and reissue those directives, which affect how agencies acquire AI tools and use them.
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“For the last four years, the Biden administration has basically prosecuted and persecuted crypto companies, really driving them offshore,” Sacks said on FOX Business’ “The Evening Edit” last week. “I’ve heard so many outrageous stories by founders, by entrepreneurs, the Biden administration would not tell them what the rules of the road were, and they would then get prosecuted. And what the industry wants more than anything else is regulatory clarity.”
“They’re saying, ‘just tell us what the rules are. We will abide by them’,” he added. “And the Biden administration would never do that. And because of that, all the innovation was basically moving offshore, and America was about to lose this technology of the future.”
Alexandr Wang, CEO at Scale AI, a San Francisco-based software company, spoke out over the weekend on the DeepSeek technology, calling its quick success a “wake-up call for America.”
“DeepSeek is a wake up call for America, but it doesn’t change the strategy,” Wang wrote in a post on X.
Wang explained that the “USA must out-innovate & race faster, as we have done in the entire history of AI” and “tighten export controls on chips so that we can maintain future leads.”
“Every major breakthrough in AI has been American,” Wang said.
FOX Business’s Stepheny Price, Breck Dumas and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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