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.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that's throwing tech valuations into chaos and challenging U.S. dominance in the field with an open-source model that they say they developed for a fraction of the cost of competitors.

A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.