When news broke in late January 2025 that the Chinese startup DeepSeek had released a new frontier artificial-intelligence (AI) model, it rattled world markets. The open-source model can perform on par with AI giants like ChatGPT, but at a fraction of the cost and computing power. This development put Silicon Valley on its toes. How had DeepSeek managed to achieve the highest AI performance benchmarks with such limited resources? Meta immediately started assembling a team to analyze this remarkable breakthrough. And lawmakers and regulators in Australia, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States have initiated measures to block the use of DeepSeek, mostly in government settings.
