Opinion: OpenAI accuses China of stealing its content, the same accusation that authors have made against OpenAI

The announcement by the Chinese firm DeepSeek of its R1 model also provoked not a little hand-wringing over the idea that China could so easily have outpaced American tech companies, which have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to bring their AI performance to a level that DeepSeek seems to have achieved at a fraction of the cost. — Bloomberg

The unveiling Monday of a Chinese-made AI bot that seems cheaper, more efficient and in some ways more accurate than American-grown versions certainly kicked up a fuss in the AI space.

Nvidia, the maker of the high-priced chips indispensable for AI development, lost nearly US$600bil (RM2.6 trillion), or 17%, in stock market value, the largest one-day market drop for any US stock, ever. The loss wiped out the previous record, a US$279bil (RM1.2 trillion) loss suffered last September by, yes, Nvidia. The loss triggered cascade of losses for other tech companies and consequently a major 3% downdraft in the Nasdaq index.