The world of artificial intelligence has long been dominated by a handful of tech giants, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, each competing in a high-stakes race to build ever more powerful models, backed by massive GPU clusters and vast computational resources. For years, the assumption was clear: progress in AI required access to the most advanced hardware and astronomical budgets.
Then came DeepSeek-R1. Its release sent shockwaves through the AI industry. The stock markets plummeted, and the AI world was going wild. Some even called it AI’s Sputnik moment, signalling that China is now competing at the highest level of AI development, even with ongoing sanctions and hardware restrictions in place. But what is it that makes DeepSeek-R1 so special?