Meta assembled four war rooms of engineers to determine how a Chinese hedge fund managed to release an AI game-changer that may already rival its own technology, The Information reported.

DeepSeek, an AI startup backed by hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, this month released a version of its AI chatbot, R1, that it says can perform just as well as competing models such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.

The potentially groundbreaking, open-source tech has called into question the gargantuan AI investments made by American companies and has put Meta’s AI-dedicated team on high alert.