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.

DeepSeek claims it costs them less than $6 million to train its latest AI models, while it costs ChatGPT $100 million. DeepSeek is able to charge only $0.14 per 1 million input tokens, compared to $15 at OpenAI. Token input pricing has to do with the amount of text that goes into training the AI language models.