After DeepSeek, Venture Capital Investors Face Questions About Their A.I. Bets

Jordan Jacobs, an investor at the venture capital firm Radical Ventures, has spent the last few days fielding half a dozen calls from his firm’s investors. All of them wanted to know about DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence app that topped the app stores over the weekend.

DeepSeek had created a powerful A.I. model with far less money than most A.I. experts thought possible, upending many assumptions underlying the development of the fast-evolving technology. To calm the panic, Mr….