‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot

"You see, dear grandchildren, your grandfather used to have an apple orchard. The fruits were so sweet and nutritious that every town citizen wanted a taste because they thought it was the only possible orchard in the world. Therefore the citizens gave a lot of money to your grandfather because the citizens thought the orchard would give them more apples in return, more than the worth of the money they gave. Little did they know the world was vastly larger than our ever more arid US wasteland. Suddenly an oriental orchard was discovered which was surprisingly cheaper to plant, maintain, and produced more apples. This meant a significant potential loss of money for the inhabitants of the town called Idiocracy. Therefore, many people asked their money back by selling their imaginary not-yet-grown apples to people who think the orchard will still be worth more in the future.

This is called investing, or to those who are honest with themselves: participating in a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme. You see, children, it can make a lot of money, but it destroys the soul and our habitat at the same time, which goes unnoticed by all these people with advanced degrees. So think again when you hear someone speak with fancy words and untamed confidence. Many a times their reasoning falls below the threshold of dog poop. But that's a story for another time. Sweet dreams."

Basically US company's involved in AI have been grossly over valued for the last few years due to having a sudo monopoly over AI tech (companies like open ai who make chat gpt and nvidia who make graphics cards used to run ai models)

Deep seek (Chinese company) just released a free, open source version of chat gpt that cost a fraction of the price to train (setup) which has caused the US stock valuations to drop as investors are realising the US isn't the only global player, and isn't nearly as far ahead as previously thought.

Nvidia is losing value as it was previously believed that top of the line graphics cards were required for ai, but turns out they are not. Nvidia have geared their company strongly towards providing for ai in recent times.

Let's say I make a thing. Let's say somebody offers to buy it from me for $10. I sell it to them, and then let's say somebody else makes a better thing, and now no one will pay more than $2 for my thing. If my thing is a publicly traded corporation, then that just "wiped off" $8 from the stock market. The person I sold it to "lost" $8. Corporations that make AI and the hardware to run it just "lost" a lot of value.