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.

A Chinese company’s cut-rate computing solution has upended the tech world, with companies, investors and even the U.S. government trying to understand what it means for the future.

The stock market was sent reeling earlier this week as Chinese AI startup DeepSeek unleashed chaos, triggering a $1 trillion tech selloff that erased $600 billion from Nvidia’s (NVDA) market value in a single day.