Chinese AI lab DeepSeek provoked the first Silicon Valley freak-out of 2025. Here's what it could mean for American AI policy.

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.

OpenAI said on Wednesday that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's open-source models may have "inappropriately" based its work on the output of OpenAI's models, an OpenAI spokesperson told Axios. Why it matters: China's DeepSeek has taken the AI industry by storm with its R1 reasoning model that competes with OpenAI's o1,

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released an advanced AI model which rivals leading models from OpenAI. The DeepSeek-R1 model can perform complicated mathematical reasoning, code generation, and more with fewer resources than its American competitors.

The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure.

The U.S. tried to slow China’s advances, but the startup showed how hard that is.

The Chinese tech company DeepSeek is causing major waves in the AI industry - what are they doing that’s making everyone rethink AI’s future?