Silicon Valley is coming to grips this week with the realization that creating an advanced artificial intelligence model may no longer be as specialized a task as was once believed.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the United States' biggest artificial intelligence investors are rethinking where they put a bulk of their combined $131.5 billion last year in the wake of the debut of China's open-source AI model, DeepSeek.

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.