DeepSeek spooks American tech industry as it tops the Apple App Store

It suddenly seemed to many observers on social media that American tech companies like OpenAI and Google—which have so far thrived on proprietary, closed models—have “no moat,” as tech insiders often say, which means that those companies’ technological lead, access to cutting-edge hardware, or impressive bankrolls do not necessarily protect them from upstart market challengers.

On Friday, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote on X that DeepSeek R1 is “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen” and a “profound gift to the world.” The endorsement from the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder added fuel to the growing buzz around DeepSeek.

On top of that, over the weekend, DeepSeek’s app, which allows users to experiment with both the R1 model and the company’s V3 conventional large language model (LLM) for free, shot to the top of the US iPhone App Store. Multiple AI-related Reddit threads have suddenly been plastered with DeepSeek-related posts, leading to so-far unfounded accusations that someone in China is astroturfing—pretending to be ordinary users but actually posting with an agenda to support something—to artificially drum up support for the Chinese AI company.

Over the past weekend, social media has been overtaken with a sort of “sky is falling” in AI mentality, coupled with geopolitical angst about US economic rival China catching up with America, which perhaps inspired a measure of panic in big tech investors and led to the Nvidia stock sell-off, despite the fact that DeepSeek used Nvidia chips for training.

As tempting as it is to frame this as a geopolitical tech battle, the “US versus China” framing has been overblown, according to some experts. On LinkedIn, Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who frequently champions open-weights AI models and open source AI research, wrote, “To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think: ‘China is surpassing the US in AI.’ You are reading this wrong. The correct reading is: ‘Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.'”