How big a deal is China's DeepSeek AI model?

The China-based AI company DeepSeek sent shock waves through both Silicon Valley and Wall Street by releasing an AI model that competes with the best US ones but was made at a fraction of the cost. Although the news has sparked a sell-off of tech stocks and prompted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to describe the results as "AI's Sputnik moment" – the progress China has made on AI seems to have been a surprise to much of the tech world – this open-source AI is not as revolutionary…