Hello, Reader.
Tom Yeung here with today’s Smart Money.
Last Saturday, Donald Trump did what he does best – steal the headlines. The news cycle was fixated on DeepSeek-R1, a cheap yet powerful AI model developed in China that rivals the best products from OpenAI and Google.
Within hours, the conversation shifted.
Suddenly, the focus was no longer on AI’s economic disruption but on Trump’s proposed tariffs – a plan to impose a 25% tax on all imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tax on Chinese goods. The “official” reason for the tariffs was to protect America from illegal immigration and fentanyl, but the real motivation was to raise tax revenues, bring back American manufacturing, and protect U.S. jobs.
Perhaps the tariffs (if ever fully enacted) will succeed at the first two tasks. They could bring in significant tax revenues… and might even help “reshore” some higher-end manufacturing jobs.
However, for the 80% of Americans who work in service jobs, the real threat to employment isn’t coming from cheap imported goods.
It’s coming from innovations like DeepSeek-R1.
That’s because AI doesn’t need factories, warehouses, or foreign labor. It only needs computing power. And right now, AI is advancing at a rate that makes tariffs look like a medieval tool in a modern economy. Millions of jobs will be replaced by AI in the coming decade, and import taxes can’t do a thing about it.
To help you prepare for this inevitable future, I urge you to watch Eric’s latest presentation, 1,000 Days to AGI. In it, he outlines how super-intelligent AI is coming for American jobs, and how you can prepare financially for this future. In the meantime, I’m going to spend a few minutes helping you to prepare as well.
First, we’ll get into why banning or taxing foreign AI won’t work.
Then, I’ll outline a few areas where AI is already taking workers off of payrolls… and, therefore, why it’s so essential to act quickly.
Plus, we’ll talk about exactly how close artificial general intelligence (AGI) might be – and how long we have to prepare for it.
Let’s get started…
DeepSeek-R1: The Real Job Threat
For years, Washington has tried to slow down China’s AI progress by blocking high-end microchip exports.
The idea was simple: If China didn’t have access to high-performance computing hardware, it wouldn’t be able to compete in AI.
That strategy failed.
As I outlined here at Smart Money last week, DeepSeek-R1 proved that China discovered how to do more with less. The Chinese startup reportedly trained an advanced model for just $5.6 million – a figure Andrej Karpathy, the former head of AI at Tesla Inc. (TSLA), called “a joke of a budget.” And its performance is so good that it beats all but the best models from OpenAI and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL).
Other Chinese companies are also catching up. On January 29, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA) released its latest large language model (LLM), Qwen2.5 Max, which is almost as good as OpenAI’s o1-mini… at half the cost.
Then earlier this week, TikTok parent ByteDance demonstrated a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate, as TechCrunch puts it, “perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date.” TED Talks… historic speeches… even Taylor Swift concerts can now be generated with the click of a button. The image below shows a lecture by Albert Einstein never actually happened.
The TED Talk that never was
That’s why the latest 10% tariff increase on Chinese goods is relatively meaningless for job preservation. Today, anyone with an internet connection can download DeepSeek’s latest open-source model for free and edit the code to their heart’s content. There are no paid “imports” to tax.
Now, you might wonder what fake videos and free downloads have to do with job losses that tariffs can’t protect. You see, that’s because tariffs can help protect industries where foreign labor is the main competitor.
But AI doesn’t compete with foreign labor – it replaces labor entirely. That means, unlike previous job losses where work shifted to other countries, these jobs aren’t coming back.
The hard truth is that we now have two choices: Prepare financially, or risk being left behind. Especially since a poll of almost 1,000 businesses last year found that 30% of American businesses have already replaced some workers with AI. Thirty-eight percent plan to in 2025.
And that’s only a taste of what’s to come…
1,000 Days to “AGI”
DeepSeek’s success shows that Chinese firms might even create superintelligent AI before American ones do. So, companies like OpenAI and Alphabet are throwing everything they have to get there first. Bans on using Chinese AI – like the one U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, introduced last week – might not even work if OpenAI has a competing product
The result?
We predict that the world will see artificial general intelligence within the next 1,000 days, whether we have more tariffs or not. This is when AI becomes smart enough to replace the average human in most jobs. In fact, we’re far closer to AGI than most people realize.
In a study of PhD-level candidates, Ethan Mollick, professor of management at the Wharton School, found that OpenAI’s latest “o3” model is now even better at answering questions than top human researchers with access to the internet.
That means it’s only a matter of time before AI will create better versions of itself, and so on. As the old Bachman–Turner Overdrive song goes, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
That’s why it’s so important to prepare for the shift to come.
The companies that embrace AI early will create massive new wealth. We will have an entire generation of new millionaires who invested early in these early adopters. The companies that hesitate will fall behind, leaving their investors with nothing.
The AI Revolution isn’t waiting for anyone.
So, once again, I urge you to click here to watch Eric’s free broadcast, 1,000 Days to AGI, and get ahead of the biggest wealth shift in history.
Regards,
Thomas Yeung
Markets Analyst, InvestorPlace
P.S. Amidst headline chaos, there is one asset that can thrive during uncertain times: crypto.
According to Luke Lango, President Trump’s first 100 days in office are set to trigger a short crypto wealth window, which is why Luke launched The Great American Crypto Project.
Just this morning during a special presentation, he showed a new way to invest – a proprietary quant based crypto algorithm designed to help find fast-moving cryptos that could multiply your money 10X, 50X, even 100X in 90 days or less.
To watch a replay of the event available for a limited time, click here.
