When It Comes to Investing, Is A.I. Worth the Hype?

A.I. chatbots are fun, sometimes even useful and, until recently, endowed with the uncanny ability to mesmerize investors and fuel the U.S. stock market.

But the excellent performance of a new, relatively cheap artificial intelligence engine from a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, has perturbed the market and complicated the A.I. story.

Investors are re-evaluating prominent companies swept up in A.I. fever, including Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and the private start-up OpenAI….