A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

Chinese investors are rushing into AI-related stocks, betting the artificial intelligence advance of home-grown startup DeepSeek will lead to a boom in the sector and give the initiative to China in an intensifying Sino-U.