Key Takeaways AI stocks had a volatile week as Wall Street reckoned with the implications of a sophisticated, cost-efficient AI model from Chinese start-up DeepSeek.Semiconductor stocks such as Nvidia and Broadcom sold off on Monday as investors worried DeepSeek's efficiencies would temper enthusiasm for AI infrastructure spending.

"In our view this is a correction and not the start of a sustained bear market," Goldman Sachs said. DeepSeek sparked a $1 trillion market rout on Monday.

A Chinese company’s cut-rate computing solution has upended the tech world, with companies, investors and even the U.S. government trying to understand what it means for the future.

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.

The startup DeepSeek was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China and released its first AI large language model later that year. Its CEO Liang Wenfeng previously co-founded one of China’s top hedge funds, High-Flyer, which focuses on AI-driven quantitative trading.

In this latest installment of Opening Bid, Jason Thomas of Carlyle weighed in on what the arrival of DeepSeek might imply for markets and its competitors like Nvidia.

As we’ve written numerous times elsewhere, the cause of Monday’s DeepSeek market wobble were fears that good-enough LLMs won’t cost billions to build and run, and that supplying them won’t be a winner-take-all competition.