US Takes on China's AI Leap with New Exec Order (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: HARI SREENIVASAN President Trump's version of AI policy will be aimed at keeping America ahead. That's the message from his new executive order out yesterday. But amid the escalating race against China, the order is meant to maintain America's leadership and develop AI systems, quote, free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. Our dear Durbose has been covering those developments out of China and drilled down this week on DeepSeek, a mysterious hedge fund turned AI lab that has caught global attention. All the talk at Davos this week and it has sent Silicon Valley into a bit of a panic. This is a sneak preview of that month long deep dive.

Speaker 2: China's latest AI breakthrough has leapfrogged the world.

Speaker 3: I think we should take the development out of China very, very seriously.

Speaker 2: A game changing move that does not come from open AI, Google or meta.

Speaker 4: There is a new model that has all of the valley buzzing.

Speaker 2: But from a Chinese lab called DeepSeek.

Speaker 4: It's opened a lot of eyes of like what is actually happening in AI in China.

Speaker 2: What took Google and open AI years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build, DeepSeek says took it just two months and less than six million dollars.

Speaker 3: They have the best open source model and all the American developers are building on that.

Speaker 2: I'm Deirdre Bosa with the tech check take China's AI breakthrough. That entire piece. It's about 15 minutes long and it features interviews with perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas and benchmark partner Chetan Puganga. Find it at CNBC dot com slash TC takes it as well worth a watch. Big thank you to Jasmine Wu, Laura Batchelor and Drew Trost on the tech tech team who really began digging into this with me after the DeepSeek Christmas Day drop, which kicked off the cycle of events, guys, that has now upended so much of what we thought we knew about development and the race between the U.S. and China and puts these big CapEx numbers like the one we got from Meta this morning into some new context here, because clearly the Chinese are doing this a very different way and that could change the way things are done over here.