The cheap Chinese chatbot has stunned tech giants – and opened up the possibility that other countries, not just China, could now afford to enter the AI race

At 2.16pm California time last Sunday, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” he posted on X.

A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America’s leading models at a fraction of the cost.