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.

By some measures, Boston’s startup ecosystem has been left far behind Silicon Valley in the race to develop artificial intelligence. But the shocking emergence of Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek could actually help Boston catch up.

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent,

DeepSeek released an open-source artificial intelligence model in December, saying it took only two months and less than $6 million to create it.

Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals.

At least three other companies including those backed by Alibaba and Tencent released updates to their applications in recent weeks.