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.

A Chinese company’s cut-rate computing solution has upended the tech world, with companies, investors and even the U.S. government trying to understand what it means for the future.

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.