DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough challenges Big Tech with a cheaper, efficient model. This may be bad for the incumbents, but good for everybody else.

The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure.

The U.S. tried to slow China’s advances, but the startup showed how hard that is.

Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek developed its new models that have taken the world by storm by training them on content from OpenAI, President Trump’s AI czar David Sacks said Tuesday.

If you ask it what model are you, it would say, ‘I’m ChatGPT,’ and the most likely reason for that is that the training data for DeepSeek was harvested from millions of c