I think we’re about to get a crash in 5 hours folks

The companies known as the Magnificent Seven make up over 20% of the global stock market. And a lot of this is based on their perceived advantage when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).

The big US tech firms hold all the aces when it comes to cash and computing power. But DeepSeek – a Chinese AI lab – seems to be showing this isn’t the advantage investors once thought it was.

DeepSeek doesn’t have access to the most advanced chips from Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). Despite this, it has built a reasoning model that is outperforming its US counterparts – at a fraction of the cost.

Investors might be wondering about how seriously to take this. But Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella is treating DeepSeek as the real deal at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“It’s super impressive how effectively they’ve built a compute-efficient, open-source model. Developments like DeepSeek’s should be taken very seriously.”

Whatever happens with share prices, I think investors should take one thing away from the emergence of DeepSeek. When it comes to AI, competitive advantages just aren’t as robust as they might initially look.

  • Stock markets haven’t all opened yet. NASDAQ futures down 3.5%, S&P futures down 2%, NVIDIA down 12% in pre-market. A lot of other microchip/AI companies are also down in the 7-10% range.

    We’ll have to see what happens to the market once it opens, so checking back in 4-5 hours or so might give a better picture.