Emergence of DeepSeek and its R1 Model

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has garnered significant attention with the release of its new reasoning model, R1, which directly competes with OpenAI's offerings. The model's emergence has raised eyebrows, particularly because it performed exceptionally well while being inexpensive to produce, costing around $5.5 million to train compared to traditional models. Its affordability and capability to match performance metrics of models from leading American labs have sparked discussions about the potential end of U.S. dominance in AI. As a response, there is an ongoing panic over the implications this could have on the tech industry and the stock prices of major players like NVIDIA.