Did China’s DeepSeek NUKE the American AI industry?

Nvidia shares plummeted by 18% on Monday, losing $590 billion in market cap — the largest in market history — after the release of China’s new AI model, DeepSeek.

“That led to panic, especially in the tech part of the stock market in the AI bubble. They’re worried that it might start to pop,” Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight” tells investment banker and author of “MoneyGPT” James Rickards and co-host Matthew Peterson.

“What’s interesting, the Chinese DeepSeek is not necessarily better than the artificial intelligence and GPT-type applications that we have in the United States, but it is a lot faster, and that’s the key,” Rickards explains.

“The companies that suffered, Nvidia in particular, are hardware manufacturers. If you can do the same work faster and with a lot fewer chips, obviously that’s going to hurt the chip manufacturers like Nvidia,” he adds.

However, Rickards notes that “the Chinese have a long reputation of cheating in technology, stealing intellectual property.”

“Is this thing really just as good, but much, much faster? Maybe only using 10% of the power and the processing power that we use, or were they able to cheat in the training set?” he asks. “The training set is all the material that the large language models and the artificial intelligence algorithms sort of read in order to learn how to answer questions and basically interact with humans.”

“We need to learn more about it. It is a dramatic breakthrough. I don’t want to say that the Chinese did cheat, I don’t know that for a fact. I do know, they’ve done that in other cases, so I think we need to learn more,” he adds.

Peterson believes this was “timed in an interesting way,” as it was right after Trump came into office.

“Right, I definitely expect volatility in the U.S. stock markets now,” Rickards says, though he notes the timing means more for China.

“As far as China’s concerned, their economy is in deep trouble, and there was one of their prominent economic commentators recently who wasn’t arrested, but he was told to shut up basically because he was speaking candidly about their GDP,” he explains, adding that China might even be “in a slight recession.”

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