HACKER Q&A
📣 prompt_overflow

Are the tariffs a retaliation after China ruined AI companies profits?


After years of investment and billions spent, any chance of U.S. companies profiting _wildly _from AI has been destroyed by China's open-source models—especially those like DeepSeek.

I don't mean existing closed models aren't useful anymore, but realistically, 90% (or even more) of what can be accomplished with a proprietary model can now be done with an open-source alternative.

This has clearly devastated profit expectations, and investors—who poured money into speculative AI ventures—should be furious. (Think about all money that has being spent so far and remember about R$500 billion investment announcement by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank)

Could this have been triggered the retaliation into tariffs from the U.S. against China, after they have been destroyed the most prominent and speculative profit market ever created?

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
No way Trump is thinking like that. More he is thinking about more general complaints that dependence on China has hollowed US manufacturing. Fears that BYD will put Detroit and Tesla out of business, 'real economy' stuff. Trump is more worried that China will beat us in artificial stupidity than artificial intelligence.
👤 WorldPeas
I don't think it's that big of a threat, it'd be like saying that linux is a threat to macos/windows, it is, to a degree, but anthropic/oai/etc have their niches and those niches are people who don't want to set up models on their own metal. This is coming from a deepseek user, it is a threat to some use cases sure, but this is not an ai thing. A more cynical part of me thinks this is just for attention. This is (in his mind) revenge for the de-industrialization of the 80s)