DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence startup that’s just over a year old, has stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating AI models that offer comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of their development cost.
DeepSeek’s emergence may offer a counterpoint to the widespread belief that the future of AI will require ever-increasing amounts of computing power and energy.
Global technology stocks tumbled on Jan. 27 as hype around DeepSeek’s innovation snowballed and investors began to digest the implications for its US-based rivals and AI hardware suppliers such as