Did AI just have a "Sputnik moment"?

That's what someinvestors, after the little known Chinese startup DeepSeek released a chatbot that experts say holds its own against industry leaders, like OpenAI and Google, despite being made with less money and computing power.

Buzz around DeepSeek built into a wave of concern that hammered tech stocks on Monday. It wiped almost $600bn from chipmaker Nvidia's market value.

Not iterative or evolutionary, but pathbreaking

"This is, I think, something that has really shown to some degree how much the U.S. was living in a bubble," said Antonia Hmaidi, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.