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.

Hype around DeepSeek sent the stock price of several Chinese companies soaring, but proof of their ties to DeepSeek is non-existent.

But the shocking emergence of Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek could actually help Boston catch up. The free-of-charge app, launched last week, showed off conversational chops close to the level of ChatGPT,