The Wire profiles the leading figures in the Chinese AI ecosystem from which DeepSeek and other companies are emerging.
Illustration by Nate Kitch
Call it the DeepSeek shock. The Chinese company’s release of a new artificial intelligence model that is on par with its Western peers, yet produced at a fraction of the cost and with far less powerful chips, has upended assumptions about the U.S.’s lead over China in AI as well as the value of major companies from Nvidia on down.
The question now is: Could there be more where DeepSeek came from?
Even China watchers in the United States have been astonished by DeepSeek’s emergence. Y
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