DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence startup that’s just over a year old, has stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating AI models that offer comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of their development cost.

DeepSeek has Silicon Valley in awe and investors in a frenzy.The Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart has shot to prominence after saying it had trained high-performing AI models cheaply, without the most advanced chips.