DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, is sending shock waves through the U.S. tech sector by demonstrating its latest AI assistant, which achieves performance comparable to or even surpassing some of the world's best chatbots.

The messaging was rolled out on platforms such as X and META.O Facebook and Instagram, as well as Chinese services Toutiao and Weibo, Graphika said.

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.

The developer of the chatbot that shocked U.S. incumbents had access to Nvidia chips that its parent company providentially acquired just before a 2022 U.S. export ban.

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 stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

The emergence of DeepSeek came shortly after President Trump unveiled his "Stargate" project to invest $500bn in advancing AI.

Apple CEO Tim Cook praised DeepSeek's AI models for enhancing efficiency, following their recent rise in app stores. He discussed Apple's hybrid AI strategy and confirmed a partnership with ChatGPT, while not revealing plans to integrate DeepSeek's models amidst competition concerns from OpenAI.