The meteoric rise of DeepSeek—the Chinese AI startup now challenging global giants—has stunned observers and put the spotlight on China’s AI sector. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the country’s tech ecosystem has been in relentless pursuit of homegrown alternatives, giving rise to a wave of startups and billion-dollar bets.

We have a breakthrough new player on the artificial intelligence field: DeepSeek is an AI assistant developed by a Chinese company called DeepSeek. Thanks to social media, DeepSeek has been breaking the internet for the last few days.

Governments across Asia are cracking down on DeepSeek, amid growing concerns that the Chinese AI chatbot could compromise national security. South Korea is the latest to block DeepSeek's access to various governmental departments.

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.