A new Chinese AI model threatens to diminish the need for Nvidia’s most-expensive chips, but some say the concerns are overblown.

According to a paper authored by the lab, the DeepSeek-R1 model outperforms cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s o1 and Meta’s Llama AI models across multiple benchmarks.

Here’s what you need to know about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that rattled markets as its app dethroned OpenAI's as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple.