Inside China, it was called the tipping point for the global technological rivalry with the United States and the “darkest hour” in Silicon Valley, evoking Winston Churchill. It was possibly a breakthrough that could change the country’s destiny.

在中国国内，它被称为与美国进行全球技术竞争的临界点，也是硅谷的“至暗时刻”，这话让人想起温斯顿·丘吉尔。这可能是改变国运的突破。

The news that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek can build artificial intelligence models that are as good as OpenAI’s, and at a fraction of the cost, tanked the stock market on Monday and sent Silicon Valley into a panic.

中国初创公司DeepSeek可以建立与OpenAI不相上下的人工智能模型，而且成本仅为OpenAI的几分之一。周一，这个消息令股市暴跌，硅谷陷入恐慌。

The claim about DeepSeek’s success was viewed in China as a shot in the arm for a discouraged tech industry and a public that’s suffering through a stagnating economy. On social media posts and state news outlets, DeepSeek was nothing less than a testament to the country’s ability to innovate, especially when facing efforts by the United States to limit China’s access to the most advanced technologies.

在中国，DeepSeek成功的说法被视为给灰心丧气的科技行业和饱受经济停滞之苦的公众打了一剂强心针。在社交媒体帖子和官方新闻媒体上，DeepSeek成了中国创新能力的证明，尤其是在美国限制中国获得最先进技术的情况下。

“A nation like China, which is equipped with substantial technological resources, cannot truly be suppressed,” wrote Hu Xijin, a retired editor in chief of the Communist Party tabloid Global Times. “U.S. sanctions in one area will only spur more comprehensive and resilient progress in China, potentially leading to breakthroughs that outpace the U.S.”

《环球时报》退休总编辑胡锡进写道：“中国这样已经有了雄厚科技资源储备的国家是不可能被真正压制的，美国从一个方向制裁，只会刺激中国更全面、更有韧性的进步，甚至‘弯道超车’。”

The American semiconductor policies toward China “may ultimately backfire on the U.S.,” he wrote.

他写道，美国对中国的半导体政策“最终困住的是谁，还说不清呢”。

On Monday evening, four out of the 10 most popular topics on the social media platform Weibo were related to DeepSeek.

周一晚上，社交媒体平台微博上10个最受欢迎的话题中有四个与DeepSeek有关。

“DeepSeek, keep up the momentum!” a Weibo user in Beijing wrote.

“DeepSeek，继续加油！”北京的一位微博用户写道。

“The nation must protect the founder of DeepSeek at all costs! Seriously!” wrote another user in Shanghai who usually posts about entertainment news.

“国家必须不惜一切代价保护DeepSeek的创始人！真的！”另一位经常发布娱乐新闻的上海用户写道。

Even a hashtag about the DeepSeek chief executive, Liang Wenfeng, visiting his hometown in southern Guangdong Province for the Lunar New Year, which falls on Wednesday, was a hot topic on Weibo. It had more than 50 million views.

就连DeepSeek首席执行官梁文锋回广东老家，庆祝周三到来的农历新年话题也成为微博热搜，点击量超过5000万。

1月27日，纳斯达克股价下跌近4%，此前有消息称DeepSeek的表现优于大牌竞争对手，尤其是美国的竞争对手。

Much of the outpouring of attention emphasized the U.S.-China tech rivalry.

大量关注集中在美中技术竞争上。

The assumption that the United States would lead the next wave of the technological revolution was now open to challenge, Li Chengdong, an e-commerce investor, wrote on his WeChat timeline.

电子商务投资者李成东（音）在他的微信朋友圈里写道，美国引领下一波技术革命的假设现在面临挑战。

Fancaiju, a business blog on WeChat, had a post saying that DeepSeek had burst the U.S. stock bubble in one fell swoop — a more significant strike than when George Soros bet against the British pound in 1992.

微信上的商业公众号“贩财局”有一篇文章写道，DeepSeek一举击破了美国股市泡沫——这比1992年乔治·索罗斯狙击英镑还要严重。

The DeepSeek breakthrough had turned the $100 billion A.I. initiative known as Stargate that President Trump announced last week into “Interstellar Graveyard,” said a post on Fancaiju.

贩财局的一个帖子称，DeepSeek的突破使特朗普总统上周宣布的1000亿美元人工智能计划“星际之门”变成了“星际墓地”。

The commentariat took immense pride that DeepSeek was stocked with talented Chinese technologists educated in China.

网上评论者对DeepSeek拥有在中国接受教育的优秀中国技术人员感到无比自豪。

DeepSeek dispelled the myth of the dominance of American A.I. talent and demystified companies like OpenAI, said Tom Zhang, a human resources expert who has worked at several big tech companies in Silicon Valley. “A group of ‘homegrown Ph.D. graduates’ from Tsinghua and Peking University outshines their counterparts from Stanford and MIT,” he wrote on his WeChat timeline.

曾在硅谷几家大型科技公司工作过的人力资源专家汤姆·张（音）说，DeepSeek打破了美国人工智能人才占主导地位的神话，也揭开了OpenAI等公司的神秘面纱。他在自己的微信朋友圈写道：“一群来自清华和北京大学的‘本土博士生’胜过了斯坦福和麻省理工的同行。”

Entrepreneurs and investors said that DeepSeek demonstrated that China’s A.I. sector had an edge in innovation. They also said they believed that the U.S. government’s export restrictions on specialized chips from the Silicon Valley tech giant Nvidia forced Chinese companies to be more efficient.

企业家和投资者表示，DeepSeek证明了中国的人工智能行业在创新方面的优势。他们还表示，他们认为是美国政府对硅谷科技巨头英伟达的专用芯片实施出口限制迫使中国公司提高效率。

That was not what Washington had intended, people in China said, but that was what happened.

中国的相关人士称，这不是华盛顿的初衷，但事实就是如此。

DeepSeek trained its A.I. chatbot with 2,000 specialized Nvidia chips, compared with as many as the 16,000 chips used by leading American counterparts. It’s also not the only Chinese company to prove the efficiency of its engineering: 01.ai, a startup founded by Kaifu Lee, a Beijing investor and entrepreneur, trained its A.I. models with computing power that cost about $3 million, the company said, compared with the $80 to $100 million OpenAI has tapped.

DeepSeek用2000枚英伟达专用芯片训练它的人工智能聊天机器人，相比之下，美国领先的同行使用的芯片多达1.6万枚。DeepSeek也不是唯一一家证明其工程效率的中国公司。由北京投资者和企业家李开复创立的初创公司零一万物表示，该公司用计算能力训练人工智能模型的成本约为300万美元，而OpenAI则需要8000万至1亿美元。

“In my book AI Superpowers, I predicted that US will lead breakthroughs, but China will be better and faster in engineering,” Mr. Lee, who studied artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, wrote on X on Sunday. “With the recent DeepSeek releases, I feel vindicated.”

“在我的《人工智能超级大国》(AI Superpowers)一书中，我预测美国将引领突破，但中国将在工程方面做得更好更快，”周日，李开复在X上写道。他曾于上世纪80年代在卡内基梅隆大学学习人工智能。“随着最近DeepSeek的发布，我觉得我被证明是正确的。”

位于中国东部浙江省杭州市的中国人工智能初创公司DeepSeek的总部大楼。

Among the most popular articles on the Chinese internet were two interviews of Mr. Liang, the reclusive chief executive, with a tech blog.

在中国互联网上的热搜文章中，有两篇科技博客对DeepSeek低调的首席执行官梁文锋的采访。

In the interviews, Mr. Liang, who founded a quantitative stock trading firm called High-Flyer after graduating with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, came across as a geeky billionaire full of idealism and optimism. He started DeepSeek as a side project in 2023 because he wanted to explore the limits of A.I., he said.

梁文锋在获得人工智能硕士学位后创办了量化股票交易公司幻方，在采访中，他给人的印象是一个充满理想主义和乐观主义的极客亿万富翁。他说，他在2023年开始将DeepSeek作为一个副业项目，因为他想探索人工智能的极限。

Mr. Liang said he believed that innovation was, first and foremost, a matter of belief.

梁文锋说，他认为创新首先是一个信念问题。

“Why is Silicon Valley so innovative? It starts with daring to try,” he said. Mr. Liang noted that when OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out, China was suffering from a lack of confidence to pursue such innovation. “From investors to major tech companies, many felt the gap was too wide,” he said.

“为什么硅谷那么有创新精神？首先是敢，”他说。他指出，当OpenAI的ChatGPT问世时，中国正缺乏追求这种创新的信心。“从投资人到大厂，都觉得差距太大了，”他说。

As China’s economy develops, he said, China should gradually become a contributor to tech innovation, rather than a follower.

他说，随着中国经济的发展，中国应该逐渐成为技术创新的贡献者，而不是追随者。

He said he believed that China’s economic slowdown wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because it could force company founders to be driven less by financial success.

他说，他认为中国经济放缓不一定是坏事，因为它可以迫使公司创始人减少对经济成功的追求。

“When many people realize that making quick money in the past was likely due to the luck of the times,” Mr. Liang said, “they will become more willing to focus on genuine innovation.”

“当很多人发现过去赚快钱很可能来自时代运气，就会更愿意俯身去做真正的创新，”梁文锋说。

Mr. Liang told the blog that he had hired mostly young graduates or even graduate students with little work experience. Every team member who worked on an A.I. model that was released last spring graduated from a Chinese university, he said.

梁文锋告诉采访他的博客，他雇佣的大多是年轻的毕业生，甚至是没有工作经验的研究生。他说，去年春天发布的人工智能模型的每个团队成员都毕业于中国的大学。

“The top 50 talents might not currently be in China, but perhaps we can cultivate such talent ourselves,” he said, a quote that has been reposted many times. People on social media portrayed DeepSeek employees as geniuses, posting their names and citing their educational background and academic papers.

“前50名顶尖人才可能不在中国，但也许我们能自己打造这样的人，”他说，这句话被转发了很多次。社交媒体上的人们把DeepSeek的员工描绘成天才，发布他们的名字，并列举他们的教育背景和学术论文。

英伟达公司首席执行官黄仁勋，摄于本月。DeepSeek使用2000枚英伟达专用芯片训练其人工智能聊天机器人，而美国主要同行使用的芯片数量高达1.6万枚。

Mr. Liang, born in 1985, didn’t attract much public attention until last week when he joined a group of businesspeople and academics for a meeting with Li Qiang, China’s premier.

梁文锋于1985年出生，此前一直没有引起公众的太多关注，直到上周他与一群商人和学者一起与中国总理李强会面。

The meeting was a sign that Mr. Liang had risen to the top, but it could also put him in an awkward position, tech executives said. The relationship between Chinese entrepreneurs and the government has been tricky after Beijing’s crackdown on the tech sector in recent years. The government wants the companies to help make China a tech power less reliant on the United States. But it’s also wary of the companies’ influence. The crackdown crushed the promise of the Chinese internet.

科技行业的高管们说，这次会面表明梁文锋已成为行业领军人物，但也可能把他置于一个尴尬的境地。在北京近年来打压科技行业之后，中国企业家与政府之间的关系变得一直很棘手。中国政府希望这些公司帮助中国成为一个不那么依赖美国的科技大国。但它也对这些公司的影响力保持警惕。那次打击行动粉碎了中国互联网的希望。

A Hong Kong investor told me that he would not invest in Chinese internet stocks as long as Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, was in office — even with the DeepSeek breakthrough. Mr. Xi is known for his dislike of the internet sector.

一位香港投资者告诉我，只要中国领导人习近平还在位，他就不会投资中国的互联网股票——即使DeepSeek取得了突破。众所周知，习近平不喜欢互联网行业。

Business executives hope the government can refrain from interfering with DeepSeek.

企业高管希望政府不要干涉DeepSeek。

“As is often the case with this government,” Zhang Fuyu, an entrepreneur, wrote on WeChat, “any promising company gets incorporated into a national strategy — receiving funding and resources but being subjected to state directives — or is directly placed under control, then DeepSeek’s future prospects may be entirely stifled.”

企业家张付宇（音）在微信朋友圈写道：“政府经常是这样，有前途的公司会被纳入国家战略——接受资金和资源，但受制于国家指令——或者被直接置于控制之下，这样，DeepSeek的未来前景可能会完全被扼杀。”

Under government regulations, A.I. models that serve consumers are subject to censorship rules. Many DeepSeek users posted photos and videos of its chatbot censoring topics including Xi Jinping, the war in Ukraine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

根据政府规定，为消费者服务的人工智能模型要受到审查规则的约束。DeepSeek的许多用户发布了其聊天机器人审查习近平、乌克兰战争、文化大革命和天安门大屠杀等话题的照片和视频。

“If DeepSeek is truly as remarkable as claimed, so impactful that it shakes the U.S. stock market, yet it remains confined to being just an AI model with Chinese socialist characteristics,” a journalist using the handle Xiaoming wrote on her Threads account, “then that would be truly tragic.”

“如果DeepSeek真的像人们所说的那样卓越，影响大到了撼动美国股市，但它仍然局限于仅仅是一个有中国社会主义特色的人工智能模型，”一个以“Xiaoming”为用户名的记者在她的Threads账户上写道，“那将是真正的悲剧。”