It's not every day that a relatively unknown player from China crashes the party hosted by tech titans like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—but that's exactly what DeepSeek has done. Since late 2022, we've seen a few AI assistants dominate the scene—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—you know the names. These tools keep getting smarter, thanks to massive cash injections (think billions), fancy data centers, and cutting-edge chips.