BEIJING, CHINA | Xinhua | The artificial intelligence (AI) community is abuzz with excitement over DeepSeek-R1, a new open-source model developed by the Chinese startup DeepSeek. Released on Jan. 20,

DeepSeek’s AI products have shaken up the American stock market and tech industry—but some experts are questioning how big of a threat the Chinese company really is.

At a supposed cost of just $6 million to train, DeepSeek’s new R1 model, released last week, was able to match the performance on several math and reasoning metrics by OpenAI’s o1 model – the outcome of tens of billions of dollars in investment by OpenAI and its patron Microsoft.