DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough challenges Big Tech with a cheaper, efficient model. This may be bad for the incumbents, but good for everybody else.

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.

Italy's data protection authority said on Thursday it had blocked Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek over a lack of information on its use of personal data.

Italy’s data protection authority has blocked use of Chinese tech startup DeepSeek’s AI application to protect Italians’ data and announced an investigation into the companies behind the chatbot

China's DeepSeek AI has already caught the eye of a data protection watchdog, shortly after it went viral and became the top-rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and other regions. As TechCrunch reports,

The Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek has rattled markets with claims its latest AI model performs on a par with those of OpenAI, despite using less advanced, more energy efficient computer chips.

The Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the world of AI last week after showing its supercheap R1 model could compete directly with OpenAI’s o1. While it wiped nearly $600 billion off Nvidia’s market value,