The rise of DeepSeek: How a Chinese startup is challenging Silicon Valley’s AI dominance

The day after Christmas, a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek unveiled a new artificial intelligence system that could match the capabilities of cutting-edge chatbots from companies such as OpenAI and Google.

That alone would have been a milestone. But the team behind the system, called DeepSeek-V3, described an even bigger step. In a research paper explaining how they built the technology, DeepSeek’s engineers said they used only a fraction of the highly specialized computer chips that leading AI companies relied on to train their systems.