DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, is sending shock waves through the U.S. tech sector by demonstrating its latest AI assistant, which achieves performance comparable to or even surpassing some of the world's best chatbots.

According to a paper authored by the lab, the DeepSeek-R1 model outperforms cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s o1 and Meta’s Llama AI models across multiple benchmarks.

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.