Many investors are worried about DeepSeek's latest breakthrough. Its Chinese developers claim to have trained a generative AI model that's on a par with many of the U.S. versions for under $6 million.

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.