Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek made headlines early this year for roiling the US stock market. On January 27, a massive sell-off wiped out nearly US$1 trillion in tech stocks, including US$600 billion from semiconductor giant Nvidia alone. The British scientific journal Nature this week acknowledged that the disruption caused in January by the Chinese start-up's release of reasoning model R1 showed how “the United States was not as far ahead in AI as many experts had thought”. That proved to be a major reason for Nature to include 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, the founder and CEO of Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, among its list of the top 10 “people who shaped science in 2025”. In its profile of Liang, Nature described him as "finance whizz" who made millions of dollars "applying AI algorithms to the stock market before using the cash in 2023 to establish DeepSeek", a spin-off from Liang’s High-Flyer Quantitative Fund. In many ways, “DeepSeek has been hugely influential”, said Adina Yakefu, a researcher at AI developer platform Hugging Face, in the Nature profile. The performance of DeepSeek’s R1 and V3, released in December, rivalled that of offerings from OpenAI and Meta Platforms at a fraction of the training cost, which cast doubt on the assumptions that underpinned the high valuations of US semiconductor and AI companies. Training costs for Meta Platforms’ Llama 3 405B model, for example, were more than 10 times greater, according to Nature. DeepSeek’s open-source AI models, which are downloaded and built on for free, have been “a boon for researchers who want to adapt algorithms to their own field”, according to Nature. That development had “prompted other companies in China and the US to follow suit by releasing their own open models”. That underscored the strides being made by #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 developers in spite of US tech restrictions barring mainland firms’ access to advanced graphics processing units. https://www.scmp.com/tech..