India, Jan. 31 -- On Monday, January 20, 2025, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI developer, launched two new open-source "reasoning" large language models (LLMs), DeepSeek-R1-zero and DeepSeek-R1, which performed equivalently to or even outperformed OpenAI's reasoning model OpenAI-o1 - at a fraction of the cost.

By Friday of that week, DeepSeek's app had climbed to the top of the Apple App Store. On Monday, January 27, 2025, a huge selloff in US tech and AI stocks (like Nvidia) removed a collective USD 1 trillion from their market capitalization. This prompted quick America-first rhetoric from Silicon Valley figures like Marc Andreesen, who called it a "Sputnik moment"; Donald Trump was more sanguine, describing it as a "wake-up call" for American ...