DeepSeek could spark a shift from hardware to software, similar to what happened to traditional computing beginning in the 1990s.

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 major disruption hit the artificial intelligence sector this week as DeepSeek, a China-based chatbot, unveiled its latest AI models—trained for just $6 million. That’s a fraction of the cost U.S. companies typically spend,