Advent of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek shakes up US-based Silicon Valley

The artificial intelligence breakthrough that is sending shock waves through stock markets, spooking Silicon Valley giants, and generating breathless takes about the end of America’s technological dominance arrived with an unassuming, wonky title:

“Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning.”

The 22-page paper, released last week by a scrappy Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek, didn’t immediately set off alarm bells. It took a few days for researchers to digest the paper’s claims, and the implications of what it described.