The DeepSeek story contains multitudes. It’s a story about the stock market, whether there’s an AI bubble, and how important Nvidia has become to so many people’s financial future. It’s also a story about China, export controls, and American AI dominance. And then, somewhere in there, there’s a story about technology: about how a startup managed to build cheaper, more efficient AI models with few of the capital and technological advantages its competitors have.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about all these angles and a few more, because DeepSeek is the story of the moment on so many levels. Nilay and David discuss whether companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should be nervous, why reasoning models are such a big deal, and whether all this extra training and advancement actually adds up to much of anything at all. (Nilay has a long comparison to Bluetooth, in case that helps you guess where we land.)

After that, we go through our email inbox ([email protected]) and the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), and talk about some of your responses to last week’s question about how people use AI. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in and called! There a …

Read the full story at The Verge.