Early this year, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shocked the tech world when its V3 model outperformed US giants’ AI models, including Meta’s Llama 3.1, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 on third-party benchmarks, delivering top-tier results at a fraction of the cost. The upset, later dubbed the “DeepSeek moment,” was compared to a modern Sputnik
