Opinion: What China’s DeepSeek breakthrough really means for the future of AI

Last week, the Nasdaq stock exchange — which lists significant U.S. tech stocks — experienced a big drop. This resulted from the Chinese startup DeepSeek announcing that it had developed an artificial intelligence model that performs as well as OpenAI and Meta’s AI technology, but at a fraction of the cost and with less computing power.

AI chip designer Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion of its market capitalization (the total dollar value of its outstanding shares of stock) — the…