American entrepreneur Palmer Luckey is not buying a lot of the hype this week over Chinese startup DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models and accused the US media of “mindlessly” reporting the company’s claims.
In an exclusive interview Tuesday on FOX Business’ “The Claman Countdown,” Luckey pointed to the widespread reporting on how DeepSeek said it spent only $5 million to train an AI model that is purportedly competitive with some AI models developed in America that cost billions.
Luckey, who sold Oculus to Facebook for billions of dollars and is the founder of defense firm Anduril, noted DeepSeek did not release the full costs of both models it developed, and he accused the media of ignoring that a significant portion of the AI startup’s infrastructure costs are still unknown.
“I think the problem is they put out that number specifically to harm US companies,” Luckey said. “
You had a lot of useful idiots in US media kind of just mindlessly reporting that that’s the case, and neither China nor the media nor DeepSeek has any kind of incentive to correct the record as a lot of US companies like Nvidia crashed to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars.”
DeepSeek’s model appears able to match the capability of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama but at a fraction of the development cost. It also rose to No. 1 on the Apple App Store over the weekend and is reportedly able to use reduced-capability chips from Nvidia.
Those revelations slammed the US tech sector Monday.
Luckey did concede that DeepSeek has made impressive strides and innovations in AI but warned against buying too much into what the company is reporting.
“I don’t think that people should take what they’re saying at face value, and they should realize that there are a lot of people cheering for the United States to fail,” he said. “There’s people who are clearly cheering for our tech companies to fail and, obviously, President Trump to fail. It’s a shame that so many of them are in the United States.
“There’s a reason they put out the news that way, and if the stock market is any indication, it’s accomplishing exactly what they hoped to,” Luckey added. “So, look, we can recognize that Chinese AI is a real competitive threat without losing our minds over it and falling for CCP [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda.”
FOX Business’ Suzanne O’Halloran contributed to this report.
