Gangtok, Jan. 28 -- A wave of excitement and concern swept through global stock markets on Monday as DeepSeek, a Chinese tech startup, made headlines with its AI chatbot, igniting debates over the intensifying technological and economic competition between the U.S. and China in the field of artificial intelligence.

DeepSeek's AI assistant surged to the top of Apple's iPhone app store as the most downloaded free app, driven by widespread curiosity about its capabilities as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. What has particularly alarmed some U.S. tech industry observers is the claim that DeepSeek has achieved advancements in generative AI comparable to those of leading American companies-but at a fraction of the cost.

This development ha...