Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

ToplineNvidia headed toward a dubious Wall Street record Monday, as the stock at the forefront of the U.S.-led artificial intelligence revolution got a scare from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company which developed a ChatGPT rival at a fraction of the reported cost of its American peers.

The Chinese AI service has Wall Street worried that it will be cheaper than expected to develop models. But as chip stocks sink, some analysts see a silver lining.

Shares of semiconductor makers were dropping early Monday as a Chinese AI model triggered questions over their lofty valuations.

According to a paper authored by the lab, the DeepSeek-R1 model outperforms cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s o1 and Meta’s Llama AI models across multiple benchmarks.