Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

Chinese state-linked social media accounts amplified narratives celebrating the launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI models last week, days before the news tanked U.S. tech stocks, according to online analysis firm Graphika.

With a model that offers comparable performance at seemingly a fraction of the cost, the DeepSeek chatbot is causing a reckoning over American dominance in the tech industry. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on advanced chip sales to slow down progress in AI elsewhere.