A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

DeepSeek topped the Apple App Store over the weekend, and R1 had already cracked the top 10 of the UC Berkeley leader board Chatbot Arena, a ranking of the top-performing AI assis

DeepSeek claims it costs them less than $6 million to train its latest AI models, while it costs ChatGPT $100 million. DeepSeek is able to charge only $0.14 per 1 million input tokens, compared to $15 at OpenAI. Token input pricing has to do with the amount of text that goes into training the AI language models.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

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.

The Nasdaq could face market-cap losses of nearly $1 trillion if premarket declines hold into the close of trading.

China’s DeepSeek AI is taking on ChatGPT, but privacy concerns, censorship, and accuracy issues are raising red flags. Here’s what you need to know.