A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

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.

the chip maker saw its market value drop by $593 billion, the biggest one-day drop for any listed company on record.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

US stocks and shares in chip-making giant Nvidia on Tuesday clawed back some of their losses following a steep sell-off a day earlier triggered by the sudden success of Chinese