DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, has broken into the mainstream consciousness with its chatbot app rising to the top of the Apple App Store charts. The company, backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund, has developed AI models that have led Wall Street analysts and technologists to question whether the US can maintain its lead in the AI race. DeepSeek's models, trained using compute-efficient techniques, have outperformed others in benchmarks, including Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT-4. However, the company's success has also raised concerns, with some countries and governments banning the use of DeepSeek's models. Despite this, DeepSeek continues to innovate, with its R1 'reasoning' model performing as well as OpenAI's o1 model on key benchmarks. The company's future is uncertain, but its impact on the AI industry is undeniable.