HBR Staff; Flavio Coelho/Getty Images; Unsplash
Summary.
In January, the Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled the AI world, tech stocks, and Wall Street darling NVIDIA when it released an open-source model that was smaller, more efficient, and significantly cheaper to build than products from leading U.S. companies. DeepSeek quickly jumped to the top of app-store charts, and the moment was declared a wakeup call for western AI companies.