The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday, Jan. 28, edition that shares in major tech companies fell sharply on Monday following the release of inexpensive artificial intelligence models by Chinese start-up DeepSeek. A triple bylined item in The Globe reports that DeepSeek's new AI model, R1, is designed to handle complex problems, raising concerns about U.S. dominance in AI. Nvidia experienced a 17-per-cent drop, losing about $550-billion in market value. Alphabet and Microsoft dropped 4.2 per cent and 2.1 per cent. Celestica plummeted 28 per cent, and energy firms, including Capital Power, also saw significant losses. The benchmarks used to assess the prowess of DeepSeek's models show that R1 is about on par with some of the latest releases from U.S. companies, such as OpenAI and Meta. The models are also open-source, meaning the code is available for free. To top it off, DeepSeek unveiled an image generation model on Monday that it says outperforms its competitors. The performance and costs of DeepSeek's models are making some investors nervous. Maverix Private Equity founder John Ruffolo says, "If you're an investor devoted to this space, you must be panicking today."