Chinese tech startup DeepSeek released a model of its AI service that seemingly is on-par with U.S.-based competitors like ChatGPT, but required far-less computing power.

DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store, and the company is disrupting financial markets, with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent to cut nearly $600 billion from its market cap on January 27th, which CNBC said is the biggest single-day drop in US history.

Shares of Apple charged higher on Monday, bucking the trend as its large-cap tech peers tumbled on concerns about overspending on AI.

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.

DeepSeek is just one of an array of companies developing AI models and applications. Here’s a guide to a number of the biggest players in China.

A new and largely unknown Chinese AI system called DeepSeek has rocked the tech industry and global markets.Tech shares plunged and chip maker Nvidia suffered falls of nearly 17 per cent on Monday, as President Donald Trump warned DeepSeek’s emergence was a “wake up call” for existing AI giants.