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.

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.

DeepSeek’s emergence has raised concerns that China may have overtaken the US in the artificial intelligence race despite restrictions on its access to the most advanced chips.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that recently launched a competitive new AI model, R1, with impressive capability at a lower cost.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has hailed DeepSeek as "one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs" in AI. The company says its latest AI models are on par with industry-leading models in the US - like ChatGPT - at a fraction of the cost.