Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.

But when a little Chinese AI company called DeepSeek takes a trillion-dollar chunk out of the U.S. stock market—in what can best be described as a nerd drive-by? Well—that story goes above the fold, to use a term my journalist friends love.

Chinese research lab DeepSeek just upended the artificial intelligence (AI) industry with its new, hyper-efficient models. DeepSeek's innovation could shrink demand for AI data center chips, which might hurt suppliers like Nvidia.