On 20 January 2025, the Chinese startup DeepSeek launched R1, a reasoning AI that was as good as the best available models at the time.

• DeepSeek became the most downloaded app in the world the same month.

R1 was priced around 20 times cheaper than OpenAI’s o1, and DeepSeek claimed that the cost of training the chatbot was much lower too.

It is not known how much it cost to develop DeepSeek, and the quoted lower costs only describe the final training of the model.

The shares of US tech companies fell after the launch of DeepSeek created uncertainty in the AI sector and beyond.

Nvidia, the designer of computing microchips and the world’s largest company, lost around 20% of its stock value.