Your Shortcut to... DeepSeek and the US/China AI race

A new Chinese artificial intelligence app sent the tech world into a spin this week when investors realised a competitor to ChatGPT had been produced at a fraction of the cost… Almost a trillion US dollars was wiped from global markets within days, and a reckoning about the huge sums of money spent on AI by US tech giants is now underway. So in this Squiz Shortcut, we’ll look at what the Chinese model - called DeepSeek R1 - does, who’s behind it, and what it could mean for the AI race between the US and China. Squiz Recommends Listening: This episode of Bloomberg’s Big Take podcast - produced by our former colleague Alex Tighe no less - which gives a quick overview of the disruption DeepSeek’s R1 caused and what it could mean for the sector. Squiz Shortcuts is your back story to the big news stories… Want the email version? Sign up for the Shortcuts newsletter here