U.S. equity markets are set to open deep in the red as investors begin to digest the significance of DeepSeek’s AI reasoning model R1.

A small lab in China has shaken Silicon Valley. The sudden appearance of an advanced AI assistant from DeepSeek, a previously little-known company in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, has sparked discussion and debate within the U.

A Chinese artificial-intelligence company has Silicon Valley raving, calling it "amazing and impressive,"despite working with less-advanced chips.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.