This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Trump greets Starmer at White House’
Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, February 28th and this is your FT News Briefing. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House and the pound is headed toward its best run in months. Plus, the AI Start-Up DeepSeek is pretty much everywhere you look in China these days.
Eleanor Olcott
The hype around DeepSeek is just unbelievable. And the pace at which DeepSeek is being spread across China is nothing short of extraordinary.
Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.
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Keir Starmer met with US President Donald Trump yesterday. The topics ranged from trade with Europe to the economy. But the highlight was how the UK and the US will approach Russia, Ukraine and European security. Here to talk about Starmer’s visit is the FT’s Whitehall editor, Lucy Fisher. Hi, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
Hi, Marc. Great to join you.
Marc Filippino
Good to have you back. So tell me, what did you make of Starmer’s visit?
Lucy Fisher
Well, I think Keir Starmer and Downing Street will be heaving a great sigh of relief this weekend as the trip went off without a hitch. You know, it felt very high stakes. And the two men in front of the cameras, in front of reporters largely presented quite a convivial projection. They did disagree on several matters. I think it’s important for Keir Starmer that he stood his ground in rebuffing Donald Trump in areas where he thought he was wrong.
But overall, Keir Starmer will be very happy with the work that is now underway for a UK-US trade deal focusing on the technology sector. And he will be more concerned about Donald Trump’s refusal and failure to confirm that Washington will provide a security backstop in Ukraine if we get to a ceasefire and any peace deal after that.
Marc Filippino
Yeah, I noticed that. And to that end, I want to play what Trump said about America’s military role in Europe when it came to the situation in Ukraine.
Donald Trump’s voice clip
If the British people are in Ukraine and they get attacked . . . You know, I’ve always found about the British, they don’t need much help. They can take care of themselves very well.
Marc Filippino|
And here’s what Starmer said in response.
Keir Starmer’s voice clip
But we’ve also always been there backing each other up between our two countries. That is why this is the greatest alliance for prosperity and security I think the world has ever seen.
Marc Filippino
Lucy, what did you glean from that interaction?
Lucy Fisher
Well, it’s quite worrying for, I think, the UK, which is at the forefront with France of European plans still at an early stage to provide a reassurance force in Ukraine after any ceasefire. But Keir Starmer has said repeatedly that this would need to be predicated on a fulsome US security backstop that would probably involve something like air cover and certainly access to satellites.
And what Trump said on Thursday was, you know, the US will be a backstop because we’ll be working in Ukraine. But really, when he was talking about that, he was referring to a minerals deal that he plans to sign with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday. And I think this idea that the US will have a kind of vested interest in Ukraine on an economic front is just not enough to European leaders’ minds to reassure them that they can risk putting their own military personnel in Ukraine and that being sufficient to deter Russia from coming back and attacking the country, or indeed European forces inside it once again.
Marc Filippino
Let’s turn back to one of what’s considered the brighter spots from Starmer’s visit, which was the economic relationship between the two countries. You had mentioned a trade deal, what do we learn there?
Lucy Fisher
Well, not much detail on that front. It’s a deal that now has senior members of the US administration working on it, and we know that it will have technology at its core. Keir Starmer was very keen to stress that Britain and the US have worked together on technology in the past. And that the UK is going to swerve an approach of overregulation, which was clearly a bit of an oblique dig at Europe and the US concerns about Europe’s or the EU’s approach to the technology sector.
We also learned — which is good news, potentially for the UK — that Britain may receive carve-outs from Donald Trump’s tariff plans if indeed this trade deal can be agreed. So that will be a big win on the economic front for London if that comes off.
Marc Filippino
Lucy, what did this meeting tell you about how the relationship between the two leaders might continue to shake out during Trump’s second term?
Lucy Fisher
Well, it was very warm. Donald Trump said repeatedly that Starmer was a special man, and clearly his sort of soft spot for the UK was clear. He talked about his investments in Scotland, several golf courses he owns there. He said he was looking forward to coming soon. And Starmer rolled out a pretty smooth gimmick in saying he had a letter from the King that he wanted Trump to read right there in front of all the reporters in the Oval Office. And of course, it was the long-expected, unprecedented invitation for Donald Trump to undertake a second state visit to the UK. And I think it’s a clever move. So it feels like the wheels have been greased for quite a positive relationship between the two men so far.
Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Lucy Fisher. Thanks so much, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
Thanks, Marc.
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Marc Filippino
The pound is bouncing back. The British currency has climbed almost 2 per cent against the dollar in February. It’s on track for its best month since September. There are two things going on here: one, investors are unwinding their so-called Trump trades, which means they’re not so confident anymore that Trump’s return to the White House will fuel inflation and push up the dollar. The other reason for the boost in sterling is domestic. We’ve seen some surprisingly positive economic data out of the UK lately. Even though inflation is still above target, retail sales and GDP data were better than expected. Plus, the Bank of England is in a rate-cutting cycle, so investors are less worried about growth.
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The AI Start-Up DeepSeek rocked global markets in January when it released a new large language model. Now China is embracing it with open arms and it’s happening at lightning speed. Here to talk about it is the FT’s Eleanor Olcott. Hey, Eleanor.
Eleanor Olcott
Hi.
Marc Filippino
So to start off, just tell us what we’re seeing in China.
Eleanor Olcott
It’s only been a month since DeepSeek launched it’s R1 model — that’s its latest, most advanced model. And the pace at which DeepSeek is being spread across China is nothing short of extraordinary. We’ve seen just a huge rash of announcements from local governments, state-owned enterprises, private companies, from automobile makers to internet giants and also, you know, hospitals and educational institutions all rushing out these announcements saying that they’ve deployed DeepSeek.
Marc Filippino
OK, so what does that look like in practice? What are some specific examples?
Eleanor Olcott
I’ve heard examples of hospitals, doctors using DeepSeek models as a kind of diagnostic tool. So the model wouldn’t necessarily act as the primary tool for providing a prognosis and treatment plan for the doctors, but they might input that treatment plan and check whether or not that aligns with the model, or if two doctors have different opinions about a treatment plan, they will kind of use the DeepSeek models — the third-party arbiter — to resolve those differences.
There are also instances of police stations or law enforcement agencies using DeepSeek as a drafting tool for administrative reports. And financial institutions using it as an analytical tool as well. So there’s just many, many different settings for DeepSeek models here.
Marc Filippino
All right, so it sounds like it’s everywhere in China. How did it get that way?
Eleanor Olcott
There’s two things really, DeepSeek has made it much cheaper and easier to kind of deploy their models. They’ve open-sourced the technology, which has massively lowered the bar for people to kind of adapt to this. The other thing is, DeepSeek has been very openly embraced by Beijing. Liang Wenfeng — the founder — has been invited to various high-level public meetings. And really, this has filtered down into this top-down message to go ahead and deploy DeepSeek to kind of capitalise on the gains that it’s made in generative AI.
Marc Filippino
So DeepSeek’s Large Language Models or LLMs are incredibly popular. What’s next for the Start-Up?
Eleanor Olcott
Much of this is happening completely without DeepSeek’s involvement. It’s an open-source model, so anyone can just download the model and train it for its own application. It’s not a cloud provider. It doesn’t have like huge computing infrastructure to support this mass deployment. So really the beneficiaries of that would be the cloud providers like Huawei or Alibaba Cloud.
DeepSeek continues to be extremely focussed on research, ensuring that it’s pushing forward the frontiers of LLM research and getting to a situation where these models are even more capable and even more powerful and that continues to be its focus for now.
Marc Filippino
Do you think that DeepSeek can keep up the strong streak that it’s on?
Eleanor Olcott
The hype around DeepSeek is just unbelievable. It seems like every single Tom, Dick and Harry is deploying DeepSeek in some way. Now, there are reasons to treat some of these announcements with a very, very healthy dose of scepticism, right? Like, some companies definitely want to pile into this DeepSeek hype to boost their stock price. I’ve also been told on the government’s side that actually there’s a lot of internal pressure on state-owned enterprises or local governments to be seen to be aligning with China’s AI darlings.
So that doesn’t necessarily mean that the models are being, like, meaningfully deployed in actual kind of real-life settings. But I do think it represents a step change. The vibe has just completely changed here. You’re seeing this willingness to test out the technology to deploy it in so many different ways. And I think that will have a really long-term impact on China’s adoption and acceleration of AI.
Marc Filippino|
Eleanor Olcott is the FT’s China technology correspondent. Thanks, Eleanor.
Eleanor Olcott
Thank you.
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Marc Filippino
You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news.
The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonja Hutson, Fiona Symon, Lulu Smyth, Ethan Plotkin, Kasia Broussalian, and me, Marc Filippino. Our engineer is Joseph Salcedo. We had help this week from Katya Kumkova, Michela Tindera, David da Silva, Michael Lello, Peter Barber and Gavin Kallmann. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. And our theme song is by Metaphor Music.
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