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 is just one of an array of companies developing AI models and applications. Here’s a guide to a number of the biggest players in China.

With a model that offers comparable performance at seemingly a fraction of the cost, the DeepSeek chatbot is causing a reckoning over American dominance in the tech industry. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on advanced chip sales to slow down progress in AI elsewhere.