The Daily Signal - Pete Hegseth First Day at Pentagon, Chinese AI Damages Stocks, Troops Headed to Border | Jan. 27

Starting point is 00:00:00 At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today.

Starting point is 00:00:25 We'd love to talk, business. Pete Hegseth has arrived at the Pentagon and changes are coming swiftly. I'm Virginia Allen and this is the Daily Signal's top news in 10 or Monday, January 27th. Pete Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon this morning for his first day of work as Secretary of the Department of Defense. He spoke with reporters as he walked in. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to serve on behalf of the president and serve on behalf of the country. It's an amazing job beyond what anyone can fathom.

Starting point is 00:01:07 but in talking to the chairman and so many other folks here, we're incapable hands. The warfighters are ready to go. Hegsteth faced as narrow a vote as he possibly could have late Friday night. The Senate was split 50-50 in its vote on whether or not to confirm Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance cast that tie-breaking vote in order to confirm him as the next Secretary of Defense. Heg Seth today reiterated that the Pentagon will carry out Trump's executive or including removing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs inside the Pentagon, and reinstating troops who are pushed out or fired because they refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Trump is also expected to sign an executive order barring transgender individuals from serving in the armed forces. Hegseth also pledged that the Defense Department will work hand in hand with border officials to carry out Trump's border and immigration agenda. He's made it very clear. There's an emergency at the southern border, that the protection of the sovereign territory of the United States is the job of the Defense Department, and the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations. As a result, this Pentagon snapped two last week. We helped move forward troops, put in more barriers, and also to ensure mass deportations, support of mass deportations in support of the president's objective. That is something the Defense Department absolutely will continue to do.

Starting point is 00:02:35 do. Hegeseth said that the lawful orders of the President of the United States will be executed inside the Defense Department swiftly and without excuse, and noted that the U.S. will be no better friend to our allies and no stronger adversary to those who want to test us and try us. Chinese artificial intelligence caused some big issues in the stock market today. An AI model known as Deepseek led to several technology stocks taking quite a big hit. The Washington Post reports that U.S. chipmaker Nevito was down by 12 percentage points at the opening bell this morning. Microsoft lost around 3.5 percentage and meta 1.6% Oracle 7%. Here with us to explain exactly what is going on here is Heritage Foundation

Starting point is 00:03:27 tech policy expert Daniel Cochran. Daniel, thanks for being with us. Great to be here. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. What exactly is Deepseek? What do we know about it? So deep seek is a what's called a large language model. And large language models are essentially AI that uses machine learning to analyze and produce human-like text, right? So if you think about in the American context, we have LLMs like Gemini, like Meta's Lama, like the most famous example, OpenAI's ChatGPT. Deepseek is essentially a Chinese LLM. And it's very, very, it is now considered one of the most powerful models on par with chat GPT. And that's, of course, one of the reasons why these headlines are, or it's generated the headlines it has.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Okay. So it's not necessarily surprising that China would come up with a very powerful AI model. Why is it seen, though, as a threat? So there's a couple reasons. The first is that, number one, it was thought that China was behind us in the AI race, and now they're able to all of a sudden, you know, show up with this model. Probably that's been been in development for many months, but just under wraps. But it's sort of on par with American models. But the bigger reason, and a lot of people are claiming that this model was developed, or the company claims it was developed with only about $5 million, which, of course, compared to the billions and billions that our U.S. companies are spending, right?

Starting point is 00:04:51 That seems pretty crazy. Now, I think that's probably not actually the case. I think what's probably going on there is the Chinese government has heavily subsidized and they've provided a lot of the infrastructure behind the scenes. But now the fact is it's been done under the cover of darkness. So this hasn't really been on the market. Now the markets are catching up, right? And they're seeing, wow, China can compete, which is something we here at the Heritage Foundation have warned about for years.

Starting point is 00:05:18 And so it's something that the U.S. companies are having to reckon with. And this is a national security concern as well as an economic one. So is that why those security concerns? Is that why we saw so many tech stocks take a nosedite today? Well, so it's interesting. I think that the nosedive in the tech stocks is actually a false flag. You know, there's sort of the short-term way to interpret this event is, oh, China's ahead, where, you know, we're getting crushed.

Starting point is 00:05:46 So pull out of, say, Nvidia. Invita was one of the largest losers. And Nvidia, again, creates, they manufacture the chips that are essential for these LLMs. But I actually think that's a very short term and sort of wrong perspective because the reality is that in order to catch up with China, what's going to have to happen is even more capital investment in R&D. And perhaps one of the biggest lessons that we should take away from this is that while American companies have been really prioritizing shareholders, so short-term shareholder profits, the Chinese have been prioritizing making fundamental strides in the technology

Starting point is 00:06:21 itself. And now that's showing up. Again, they've been doing that behind the scenes, but now it's sort of, it's on display, and we're seeing what that could mean both for like commercial applications initially. but also long-term, we're going to see this in other applications as well. So the stock market, I think the immediate sort of reaction is actually what the Chinese want, which is less American companies investing in the hard infrastructure and R&D necessary to stay ahead of them. And that's really, I think, what we should take away from this.

Starting point is 00:06:52 What will you be watching in the coming days and weeks? I'm going to be watching to see whether sort of the stock market adjust, that it reflects sort of the reality that China's trying to trip us up, whether the investors get smart to this and say, look, we're not going to just like have this knee-jerk reaction. We're going to take a longer-term approach to investing in the underlying technology to make sure we stay ahead of China. Heritage Foundation's Daniel Cochran. Daniel, thanks for being with us. Thank you. Texas and the U.S. government are working hand in hand to secure the border.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Texas Governor Greg Abbott is sending helicopters and 400 soldiers to the border to help with President Donald Trump's federal border security efforts. The Texas tactical border force will be joining thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers that are already down at the border. And in related border and immigration news, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also referred to as ICE, reports that they have arrested over 2,300 illegal aliens since Trump was sworn in just a week ago. But the administration wants more daily arrests. Instead of making a few hundred arrests every day, the Trump administration has directed ICE to race. ramp up to 1,200 to 1,500 daily arrests. These criminal illegal aliens are then being put on planes and sent back to their home countries. The Trump administration did run into some issues over the

Starting point is 00:08:19 weekend when Colombia refused to allow two U.S. military flights full of criminal illegal aliens to land in Colombia. Trump was not pleased. The president wrote on X that Colombia's choice to turn these illegal alien flights away jeopardize the national. security and public safety of the United States. As a result, Trump announced 25% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Colombia. He also slapped a travel ban on Colombian government officials and said the U.S. would revoke their visas. After Trump announced these sanctions and some others, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, changed his tune. And by Sunday night, Petro agreed that Colombia would accept all U.S. flights of Colombian illegal aliens,

Starting point is 00:09:05 without limitation or delay. The White House said that Colombia's capitulation makes clear to the world that America is respected again. And President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our national sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States, according to the White House. Trump has held off on imposing those tariffs on Colombia. We'll be right back with today's newsflash after this. China is pushing back after the CIA issued a statement this weekend on the origins of COVID-19. The CIA says that a lab leak in Wuhan, China is more likely to have caused the virus than an infected animal spreading the virus. Well, Beijing's foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, said that the laboratory leak theory has been found to be extremely unlikely by the joint China.

Starting point is 00:10:02 WHO expert team. As the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold, tens of thousands of Palestinians began making their way back to northern Gaza today. Many fled their homes 16 months ago after Israel dropped leaflets telling citizens to evacuate after Hamas carried out the October 7th attack. The current ceasefire includes the release of 33 hostages. Seven of those hostages have been released and more are expected. to be released this week. Hamas has confirmed the eight of the 33 hostages slated to be released

Starting point is 00:10:42 are already dead. This did not come as a surprise to Israel, which had concluded through intelligence that these eight individuals were no longer alive. The names of those eight have not yet been publicly reported. With that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for being with us here for the Daily Figgle's Top News in 10. Today's show was edited and produced by John Pop and Katrina Trinco. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on brand new shows from the Daily Signal podcast. And if you would, take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. Have a great rest of your night. We'll see you right back here tomorrow for the Daily Signals. Top News in 10.

The Daily Signal - Pete Hegseth First Day at Pentagon, Chinese AI Damages Stocks, Troops Headed to Border | Jan. 27

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.