The tech-heavy Nasdaq index lost nearly 4 percent in early trading Monday, with chipmaker Nvidia down nearly 12 percent.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that’s just over a year old, has stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley.

Chinese startup DeepSeek has debuted an AI app that challenges OpenAI's ChatGPT and other U.S. rivals, sending a shock through Wall Street.

In a matter of days, DeepSeek proved to be so popular as to climb to the top of Apple's App Store, surpassing OpenAI's ChatGPT as the most downloaded app. But for owners of Nvidia stock, and stock traders in general, DeepSeek is on track of becoming a black swan — an unexpected event with extreme consequences.

According to a paper authored by the lab, the DeepSeek-R1 model outperforms cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s o1 and Meta’s Llama AI models across multiple benchmarks.