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.

In the rivalry between China and the United States over domination of artificial intelligence, DeepSeek seemed to come out of nowhere. In fact, it has skyrocketed through China's tech world in recent years with a path that was anything but conventional.

A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.