Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

U.S. tech stocks, including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom, plummeted Monday after Chinese startup DeepSeek said it created an AI system that can compete against chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT at much lower costs.