When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent. Two years later, DeepSeek exploded on the scene.

A new player, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has shaken up Silicon Valley with its cost-efficient language model, DeepSeek-R1, rivaling OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Despite US export controls on advanced AI chips,

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.