The global artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has witnessed a new shift with the emergence of China’s DeepSeek, a powerful AI model developed to counterbalance American AI giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The release of DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the stock market, causing NVIDIA, one of the biggest players in AI hardware, to lose nearly $500 billion in market capitalization overnight. The tremors from this event are still being felt, and it has reignited debates on AI valuations, market speculation, and the role of opensource AI models in reshaping technological dominance. DeepSeek’s arrival signifies China’s renewed push to challenge American tech supremacy.

Unlike the walled-off approach of OpenAI, which requires massive computational resources and exclusive partnerships, DeepSeek claims to be open-source and highly efficient, requiring significantly lower costs for training AI models. This has raised eyebrows in the tech world, especially since China’s AI developments are often seen as state-backed projects aimed at global tech disruption rather than pure innovation. The market turbulence following DeepSeek’s debut also revealed the fragility of AI valuations. While the hype around AI companies has led to sky-high valuations, real-world market corrections have exposed the speculative nature of these figures. The old investment adage holds true – valuation is not a story........

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