SINGAPORE—A Chinese artificial-intelligence company has Silicon Valley marveling at how its programmers nearly matched American rivals despite using inferior chips. AI models from DeepSeek, the Chinese company,

DeepSeek’s latest models, created by a small company with limited resources, are already beating many of the leading AI models in the United States.

Since Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an open version of its reasoning model R1 at the beginning of this week, many in the tech industry have been