DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough challenges Big Tech with a cheaper, efficient model. This may be bad for the incumbents, but good for everybody else.

Chinese startup DeepSeek's cheaper AI is sharpening investor scrutiny of the billions U.S. tech giants are pouring to develop the technology and analysts say it will dominate this week's much-awaited results from industry bellwethers.

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.