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.

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 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.

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.

The startup DeepSeek was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China and released its first AI large language model later that year. Its CEO Liang Wenfeng previously co-founded one of China’s top hedge funds, High-Flyer, which focuses on AI-driven quantitative trading.