The little-known artificial intelligence firm has emphasized research, even as it emerged as the brainchild of a hedge fund.

Nvidia, which has become one of the largest-valued companies due to its AI chips, dropped 16.9%, nearly $600 billion -- the largest single-day drop in U.S. history.

DeepSeek, a 20-month-old startup founded by Liang Wenfeng, has disrupted the AI industry with its cost-effective, open-source chatbot.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.

Chinese tech startup DeepSeek released a model of its AI service that seemingly is on-par with U.S.-based competitors like ChatGPT, but required far-less computing power.