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.

DeepSeek's new AI model has sparked concerns about Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware market, causing a drop in the chipmaker's stock and raising questions about the future of high-performance AI chips.

Yet many in Silicon Valley believe the broad sell-off is an overreaction to DeepSeek’s latest model, which they argue could spur wider adoption and utility of AI by radically lowering the technology’s cost,