‘It Is Mind-Blowing’ And Left Me ‘Scared’: Andrew Ross Sorkin Stunned By Power of Chinese AI Model

CNBC host and veteran financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin discussed the launch of a new artificial intelligence model by a Chinese startup on Monday, which immediately sent the U.S. stock market tumbling.

Major AI-related companies saw their stocks dip as DeepSeek’s model reportedly took far less time and money to be trained than past AI models.

“Alexander Wang made the point last week and it’s to become sort of the question mark about all of this, which is, you know, he suggested on our air that it is possible that they were using some of the highest performing Nvidia chips, perhaps,” Ross Sorkin said. He had noted earlier in the broadcast that chip maker Nvidia had seen its market cap drop some 12 percent (it closed down 17 percent) due to Deepseek’s release.

“As many as 50,000 of them, to build this model now. And they weren’t supposed to have those chips,” Ross Sorkin continued, adding:

If that’s true the dynamic is different. If it’s not true, then maybe all bets are off. It’s possible, by the way, even if it is true, meaning even if they use those chips to create this, or at least partially to create this, it is still a significantly more efficient and better model.

“It is mind-blowing and it looks really great. I mean, it feels like it’s that it’s open source so people could test this out themselves,” he continued, adding:

I mean, it was not only faster. It was more human. The reasoning is shocking. I mean, there were moments where I was like, ‘Oh my God.’

You could feel the step change as a person. I will also say, as exciting as it was, there was an element where I became scared. Because I thought, you know, I have to talk to all these people last week and they all said, The future’s here.

And then you sort of see it and you go, okay, I feel you.

You know, in a different sort of visceral way. So, yes, I think this is all happening at a level that I’m when you when you mark your sort of history timeline in life. I think this week, this past week, today and everything else will be on it.

Co-host Rebecca Quick added, “I think Marc Andreessen put it really succinctly and really smartly when he said that this feels like the Sputnik moment for the AI race where China is really stepping in. So not just what it can do, but what it means for American dominance, in what it means for the Chinese being able to step in and to have the Chinese actually open-sourcing it, meaning that that is going to be what goes around the world. And to have the cost factors that go into this huge, huge step up and change puts us a little bit on our back foot in trying to figure out what this means.”

Watch the clip above.