Two years ago, OpenAI seized leadership in the AI race by introducing ChatGPT, a chatbot seemingly capable of all sorts of tech wizardry. Its simple, user-friendly chat window was a viral hit, forcing rivals to play catch up to avoid their hugely profitable businesses becoming obsolete.
Now, after tens of billions of dollars in spending, those rivals—Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta, among others—have closed the gap. And newcomer DeepSeek, a China-based company that wasn’t even on the radar a couple months ago, is nipping at the heels of the leaders after last month releasing a free, open-source model that’s largely as good as OpenAI’s, but at a fraction of the price.
