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.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite closed down nearly 3% on Monday, with shares of AI-focused chipmaker Nvidia plunging 17% and shaving nearly $590 billion from the company’s market cap.

Chinese startup DeepSeek’s app has climbed to the top of the iPhone charts as its newest AI assistant showed competitive performance against rivals like OpenAI and Meta.

U.S. stocks recovered some ground on Tuesday after getting hammered by fears over China's DeepSeek AI model built on a shoestring budget.

Wall Street’s superstars are tumbling Monday as a competitor from China threatens to upend the artificial-intelligence frenzy they've been feasting on. The S&P 500 was down 1.7% in afternoon trading and heading for its worst day in more than a month.

Yet many in Silicon Valley believe the broad sell-off is an overreaction to DeepSeek’s latest model, which they argue could spur wider adoption and utility of AI by radically lowering the technology’s cost,