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.

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.

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

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.