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.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

Move over ChatGPT, there's a new contender to the throne. Chinese startup DeepSeek AI blasted its way to the top of Apple's App Store this week, hammering U.S. tech stocks in the process — and reacting to the news on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart was shocked and appalled.

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.

Enter DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that has not only stunned global tech giants with its cutting-edge innovations but also weathered a significant cyberattack aimed at undermining its meteoric rise.

Liang Wenfeng, the 40-year-old founder of DeepSeek, trained as an engineer and then launched a hedge fund. Now he’s enjoying sudden success with his AI chatbot.

The little-known artificial intelligence firm has emphasized research, even as it emerged as the brainchild of a hedge fund.