DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, is sending shock waves through the U.S. tech sector by demonstrating its latest AI assistant, which achieves performance comparable to or even surpassing some of the world's best chatbots.

Discover why NVIDIA's stock dropped and how U.S. tariffs on Taiwanese semiconductors are reshaping the tech industry. NVIDIA stock

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.

Here’s what you need to know about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that rattled markets as its app dethroned OpenAI's as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple.

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 stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

Stocks rose Friday as Apple led a broad rally following a strong investor reaction to its quarterly earnings report and the market closes out a whirlwind week highlighted by Nvidia’s record-breaking losses in reaction to China’s DeepSeek cheaper AI model and a flurry of earnings reports.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) closed ~5% lower this week to end January with an ~11% slide after Chinese startup DeepSeek’s (DEEPSEEK) low-cost AI model wiped off more than $500B in market capitalization from the Santa Clara,