Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

By some measures, Boston’s startup ecosystem has been left far behind Silicon Valley in the race to develop artificial intelligence. But the shocking emergence of Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek could actually help Boston catch up.

Chinese startup DeepSeek said on Monday it will temporarily limit registrations due to a cyberattack after the company's AI assistant amassed sudden popularity. The startup earlier in the day was also hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States.

China’s DeepSeek has unveiled an AI model as advanced as Silicon Valley’s models but at a fraction of the cost. This has impacted global markets, raised concerns about AI regulation, and security risks,

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI race as the Chinese contender proves to be a more powerful, flexible, and affordable option than its US counterparts. Nowadays, it’s causing a decline in the US stock markets,