Pedestrians expecting to hear normal crosswalk commands in Silicon Valley are instead hearing prank voices of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg saying things like “F***, I’m so alone,” as some joker has hacked those cities’ crosswalk systems.

We’ve been seeing weekly protests against Elon Musk in the Bay Area and beyond lately, but the latest Musk protest in Silicon Valley certainly took it to the next level. NBC Bay Area reports that hackers have reprogrammed crosswalk signals in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Redwood City and changed the voices to mock billionaire tech CEOs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

“Hi, this is Elon Musk,” a Palo Alto crosswalk announcement now says. “Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know, they say money can’t buy happiness. And, yeah, OK, I guess that’s true; God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? Fuck, I’m so alone.”

Elsewhere in Palo Alto, another crosswalk has been reprogrammed to say “Hi, this is Elon Musk, and I’d like to personally welcome you to Palo Alto. You know, people keep saying that cancer is bad. But have you tried being a cancer? It’s fucking awesome.”

Crosswalk buttons 🚦 in several cities on the Peninsula appear to have been hacked – playing prank messages using voices that sound a lot like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

This is one of several in Redwood City @KTVU pic.twitter.com/oAukJoqGHj — Betty Yu (@bett_yu) April 13, 2025

Meanwhile in Menlo Park, KTVU reports someone has also spoofed Mark Zuckerberg’s voice on a crosswalk announcement. “Hi this is Mark Zuckerberg, but real ones call me the Zuck,” the voice says. “You know, it’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcibly insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you — you don’t need to worry because there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. Anyway, see ya.”

That same voiceover was discovered elsewhere in Menlo Park, and posted on Reddit by “hotbitch420.” If you’re dying to hear one of these things in person before city officials fix their crosswalk systems, the Chronicle reports that message can be heard at the Menlo Park intersection of El Camino Real and Santa Cruz Avenue.

And those cities’ officials are expecting the disable the prank messages and switch back to the normal ones as quickly as possible, particularly considering that the satirical messages do have a few f-bombs. “We are aware that the crosswalk signal was hacked, and that a neighboring city experienced a similar incident,” Redwood City officials said in a statement to KTVU. “Staff are actively working to investigate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

The City of Palo Alto spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that they’ve disabled the voice feature from the time being on 12 downtown intersections that they described as “malfunctioning.”

Related: Oh, No: Tartine Investor Involved In Elon Musk’s LA Diner/Drive-In Project [SFist]

Images: Left (Bulou Varanisese via TikTok), (Right) GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN – MARCH 30: Billionaire businessman Elon Musk arrives for a town hall wearing a cheesehead hat at the KI Convention Center on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town hall is being held in front of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election between Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, who has been financially backed by Musk and endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The first and only Tesla Janis Brown ever bought was a dark green Model S in 2012. It wasn’t just a car, the Sunnyvale resident recalled; it was the car.

Brown and her husband drove around the Bay Area in style, basking in the joy of owning the sleekest eco-friendly vehicle and bonding with other Tesla enthusiasts. The pair even christened it by adding a customized plate that read “Geeks Rule” — an homage to their careers in the science field.

But as the years went on, no matter how far they drove, Brown couldn’t get over Tesla’s close proximity to Elon Musk and his controversial antics, from his firing of hundreds of Twitter employees in 2023 to his support for the Trump administration to his subsequent involvement in the Department of Government Efficiency — all things she deeply disagreed with.

Finally — fed up with Musk and feeling the pride of owning a Tesla turning to shame — Brown pulled off the special plate and decided to sell the car on the online used-car retailer Carvana earlier this year.

“It turned into, ‘I’m really embarrassed to be seen driving this thing. I don’t want people to think I think like he does,’” the 60-year-old said.

Across the Bay Area, residents like Brown are choosing to leave Tesla in their rearview mirrors and selling their once-beloved cars. The decision, they say, is fueled by their desire to distance themselves from Musk — and comes as protesters around the region swarm Tesla showrooms and the company’s stocks experienced a 50% dip from its all-time high last December.

In 2024, California sales dropped by 11.6%, with a total of 203,221 Teslas sold compared to 230,010 in 2023. Tesla’s total sales last year were down 1% from 2023 — the first time the company has reported such a drop. S&P Global Mobility reports registrations for Tesla vehicles in the nation were only 43,411 in January, an 11% dip compared to last year.

Last month, Richmond couple Brian Ambrosch and Shelley Facente traded their cherished Model 3 for another electric car brand because of Musk.

“Over the years, it got worse and worse, the feeling of driving a car associated with Elon,” Ambrosch said.

The pair had bought the Tesla in 2018 and quickly grew attached to it. They had planned to keep the car until it died, Ambrosch said, but their disapproval of Musk — especially over his dismissive comments regarding transgender people and the way he handled allegations of harassment and discrimination at Tesla factories — got to them first.

“I loved that car so much, I cried the day we cleaned out all our stuff, and I drove it around the block one last time,” Facente said. “But I never looked back, and I’ve never regretted our decision to offload it, even for a second.”

Also disillusioned with Musk, Los Gatos resident Monika Gorkani recently sold her seven-year-old Model 3 on Carvana.

The 55-year-old said she used to be an Elon fan, convinced he was going to help save the world from climate change. But Gorkani said her positive impression faltered after Musk acquired Twitter and laid off most of its staff. By the time Musk had expressed his full support for Trump in the elections, Gorkani, a Democrat, was ready to break up.

“I’m not the type to switch cars,” she said. “I was planning to drive it until the battery wasn’t working … it was running fine, but at the same time I could not sleep knowing that I was somehow supporting (Musk).”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from this news organization.

The swift yet firm decision to sell is a stark contrast to a decade ago, when Californians were rushing in droves to buy the latest Tesla model. Now, recent Tesla-related news is filled with reports of protests at showrooms, acts of aggression against Tesla’s cars and car owners, and declining sales and fluctuating stocks.

Tesla’s stocks seem to also reflect that shift, as the company’s stock was down 52% from last December. It briefly picked up this week after Trump hosted a Tesla showcase at the White House and pledged to purchase one in an effort to help the company.

But not everything Musk-related is taking a hit. The cumulative value of Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and xAI has shot up 45% on private markets since November 2024, according to data from Caplight, a secondary market trading platform.

And some believe Tesla owners and cars shouldn’t be the target of those who dislike the company’s CEO. In the Bay Area, Tesla car clubs are keeping the momentum for the vehicles going by promoting in-person car events and camaraderie between owners.

Tesla Owners East Bay, an organization that brings together owners as far north as Benicia and as far south as Fremont, are hosting demo days for Tesla accessories and planning group drives this month. Their X page is filled with supportive posts related to Tesla purchases and test drives from locals.

Representatives from the organization did not respond to a request for comment by this news organization.

Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, which has members from all over the Bay Area, as well as San Joaquin Valley, NorCal-Reno, North Bay and Monterey Bay, are planning similar meet-ups, all leading up to its famed X Takeover event in July. The annual event attracts people from all over the nation and celebrates Teslas, electric vehicles, and other Musk innovations.

More than a million people also follow the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley’s X account, which is flooded with posts supporting Tesla.

Organization president John Stringer, a long-time Tesla fan and Cybertruck owner, said he won’t be selling his truck and will continue to buy Teslas in the future. The San Jose resident believes Tesla is associated with more than just Musk as the company has thousands of employees — including many of Stringer’s close friends — who are working hard to create a future of high-performing electric vehicles.

“It does get annoying to see the constant hate, but at the end of the day Tesla is employing tens of thousands of people in California,” Stringer said from inside his truck. “I’m really excited about where the company is heading.”

Stringer said he worries about the safety of fellow Tesla owners and workers these days, as violence and vandalism are becoming more common. While he hasn’t personally experienced it, Stringer said he has Tesla friends in other states who have.

“It’s an interesting time, things are polarizing,” he said. “But I think that you can feel a certain way about a person, but don’t take it out on (Tesla) owners. It’s not fair.”

In the spring of 2014, a trans-anarchist Google engineer petitioned the White House to arrest our national decline. The plan was snappy: “1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.” Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, was an avatar of technocratic liberalism. Two decades earlier, as the largely unknown C.T.O. of Sun Microsystems, he helped Bill Clinton set up the first White House Web site, and, by the time of the Obama Administration, he served as Silicon Valley’s unofficial consul to the Democratic Party. Schmidt was not himself a company “founder,” a technologist’s most regal credential, but he had performed as an able steward: when Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggled to reconcile their competing visions for Google’s first corporate jet—Brin wanted a California king bed, Page did not—Schmidt negotiated a compromise. He was sensible and civic-minded. He was the adult in the room.

In those days, Silicon Valley was perceived as an apolitical place. People in the industry were associated with a naïve techno-utopianism—the belief that problems of governance might be properly demystified as problems of engineering. They might have made libertarian or even anarcho-capitalist noises from time to time, but their underlying commitments were more or less progressive. Peter Thiel espoused the view that freedom and democracy were incompatible, and he likened the most capable founders to dictators, but these ideas seemed idiosyncratic and vain rather than dangerous. The Google engineer’s petition in favor of a Valley-backed coup was taken as a spoof. It wasn’t. A “neoreactionary” vanguard had arisen in the Bay Area. Its objective was not to retreat from the citadels of governance but to place them under siege. The Google engineer had been influenced by an obscure programmer-monarchist named Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. America, Yarvin declared, suffered from “chronic kinglessness.” Silicon Valley, where the best companies were run by executive fiat, knew how to make the trains run on time.

Today Yarvin, whom J. D. Vance has cited as an influence, is practically a household name. Yarvin, in his modesty, only ever called for one king. Now we appear to have two. Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to share the aim of personal enrichment. Their avowed priorities do not otherwise cohere, at least at first glance. Trump is a nationalist who looks to the past and promises its restoration. He would like to take Greenland. Musk is a free marketeer who looks to the future and promises its realization. He would like to take Mars. Liberals might take solace in their partnership’s apparent fundamental instability. This may be a coping mechanism.

“The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” a new book by Alexander C. Karp, the C.E.O. of the software company Palantir Technologies, and his aide-de-camp Nicholas W. Zamiska, demonstrates how these attitudes might profitably fit together. Although Karp dislikes Trump, he appeals to a more muscular America. And, although he admires Musk, he would prefer that the government remain intact. The book’s central claim is that the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex. National pride ought to provide Silicon Valley with a sense of purpose. Silicon Valley’s talents might in turn mend our sense of national competence. From our desire to take Greenland might flow our ability to take Mars.

With the possible exception of Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One,” which is one of the more strapping examples of the business-and-self-help crossover genre, most books by tech mandarins are disappointing. Karp seems like the sort of person who might have improved the canon. He was raised, outside of Philadelphia, by a Jewish pediatrician and a Black artist, and routed himself from Haverford College to Stanford Law School. The only redeeming part of his time at Stanford, which he otherwise hated, was having Thiel as a classmate. The two shared the intimate antagonism of “feral animals,” as Karp once put it, and they spent late nights locked into debates about the relative virtues of socialism and capitalism. (Thiel represented capitalism.) Karp proceeded to a doctoral program in philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, the home of the Institute for Social Research, which gave rise to the legendary “Frankfurt School.” He briefly studied under Jürgen Habermas, whose evaluation of the “legitimation crisis” appears to have made an impression on him. In 2003, Thiel started Palantir and soon after, recruited Karp to run it.

Palantir, which was named for the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings,” had twin inspirations. One was the dot-com collapse, which flattened the bubbly frivolity of early e-commerce. The other was September 11th. Thiel believed that a maturing tech industry needed to put away its eToys.com and devote itself to the serious business of national defense. Palantir’s data-integration platform pledged to discern obscure patterns that might otherwise elude human analysts. The company’s overarching ambition, Karp has said, was “to support the West”—in the local dialect, they were “saving the Shire” from the eye of Sauron. The Thiel-Karp team guaranteed a reasonable calibration of “total information awareness” and the protection of civil liberties. They were criticized from both flanks. Civil libertarians inevitably likened their products to the glittering touch screens in the predictive-policing dystopia of “Minority Report.” Other skeptics accused them of peddling vaporware. Selling infrastructure to the panopticon was not a safe play, and investors were skittish. Employees considered their public reputation unfair and inaccurate, but their communications team recognized that a sinister aura was great marketing. A small raft of contracts, along with support from the C.I.A.’s venture arm, kept them afloat until the world readied itself for their relevance. Today their market capitalization is two hundred and eighty billion dollars.

“The Technological Republic” is equal parts company lore, jeremiad, and homily. It begins with a bracing precis of the cultural, political, and technological posture of “the West,” a concept that has been lamentably “discarded by many, almost casually.” Our government “has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet.” Silicon Valley has “turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products,” and abdicating its more profound responsibilities. Only with jointly redoubled efforts will we construct “the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.” Chief among these challenges are the threats posed by an A.I.-enhanced posse of China, Russia, and Iran. The real enemy, however, is already in the house. Our society is rudderless and soft. The book’s diagnosis recalls the “post-liberalism” common to many thinkers on the new right: “The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavors society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible have been set aside as the anachronisms of another age.”

The book, too, is an anachronism of another age—an age called “last October”—and its vision of a mutually supportive relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley has in the interim been rendered almost quaint. Karp supported the campaigns of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and “The Technological Republic” was manifestly intended as an intervention in the status-quo context of a Democratic victory. The book imagines a more active government, not no government at all. Karp’s political aim reflects an attempt to resuscitate what is now frequently disparaged as Cold War liberalism, or the belief that we fought for freedom and comfort on two fronts—that the struggle for equality at home was tied to the struggle against Communism abroad. The atomic program, which was a win-win contribution to both overseas deterrence and domestic progress, is Karp’s model for how we might approach the dual-use technologies of artificial intelligence. The A.I. arms race, like its nuclear precursor, is poised to reshape the global order, and we cede first-mover advantage to China at our peril.

There are reasons to mistrust such fortune-telling, especially from people with a vested interest in the outcome. Arms races aren’t just idle predictions; they are self-fulfilling prophecies. The book’s inferences about the present state of A.I. are less controversial and more trenchant. The remarkable pace of A.I. development throws into relief the degree to which our engineering talent has been poorly deployed. We ought to expect better things from startups than improved advertising technology, stupid farm games, and luxury appurtenances for twentysomething urbanites.

The question is how this happened. Many of Karp’s colleagues blame the government for regulating away their ability to do interesting things. Karp has little patience for Washington bureaucracy, but the primary target of “The Technological Republic” is not a nation that has failed Silicon Valley. It is more cogent and original as a story about how Silicon Valley has failed the nation. The employees are spoiled and the investors are cowards. The tech barons are mere clerks and shopkeepers in disguise. Engineers and executives have lost their taste for rockets and spy planes. In the spring of 2018, Google employees protested against the company’s participation in Project Maven, a Department of Defense initiative to better analyze reconnaissance imagery. Their misgivings, Karp and Zamiska write, did not reflect “a principled commitment to pacifism or non-violence,” but “a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything” other than their own bourgeois comfort. Palantir stepped into the breach and picked up that contract. The company has not only accepted their grave obligations to national defense; it has fought for the right to serve the country. The Defense Department’s byzantine procurement policies had ruled out the use of Palantir’s commercially available software. In 2016, Palantir sued the government and won. Two years later, it was awarded an enormous Army contract.

Under a Harris Administration, “The Technological Republic” might have been brushed aside as merely Karp’s attempt to talk his own book—which, for the most part, it is. Harris, in her D.N.C. speech, promised that America would have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force,” and presumably Palantir would have continued to thrive as one of Silicon Valley’s few defense contractors. Harris’s loss, as it turns out, was Karp’s gain. This is true in a banal financial way: compared with its average price during the Biden Administration, Palantir’s stock has appreciated nearly six hundred per cent. It is more interestingly true on the plane of ideas.

Musk’s response to a coddled rank and file has been a purge. When he took over Twitter, he sent a company-wide e-mail that presented a “fork in the road,” as he put it: serve at his pleasure or find another job. The point was not to improve Twitter’s performance. It was to remind his employees of their fungibility. One of his first acts under the auspices of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency was a government-wide e-mail with a buyout offer. The subject line, lest there be any doubt as to its authorship, was “Fork in the Road.” Karp has a different attitude. Silicon Valley is not proof of concept for monarchy. It is proof of concept for war.

Silicon Valley has, or used to have, a special culture. It did not emerge in defiance of the government but as a cornerstone of the modern national project. Federal support for technological development was financial, of course, but Karp thinks this understates its monumental significance. The military-industrial complex was a kind of spiritual investment, a flame that swept through the research community and welded it together. The corporate laborers of the industrial age were drudges, and might have needed the scaffolding of managerial hierarchies to make widgets in bulk. The scientists and engineers of the electronic age, in contrast, did not respond well to top-down instruction. They responded well to meaningful challenges. They could be thrown into a room, or into the desert, with only two parameters: a hard problem to solve and a good reason to solve it. The main problem to solve was defense, and the best reasons to solve it were to secure liberty and prosperity for all.

This inspired the invention of actual objects, such as bombs, but it also inspired the invention of new processes—the languages of control theory and cybernetics—that in turn became novel experiments in social organization. Scientists and engineers arranged themselves in nested feedback loops; they were quick to criticize, and even quicker to forgive. They weren’t Randian jerks who believed in domination. They believed in the kind of grace that comes from a shared conviction in the civic purpose of their work. The campuses that came to life between San Francisco and San Jose were “a form of modern-day artistic colony, or technological commune,” Karp and Zamiska write, and these campuses recruited “a generation of talent that wanted to do something other than tinker with financial markets or consult.”

If the Silicon Valley of the 2000s and 2010s prided itself on an anti-fashion ethos—the hoodie, the New Balance trainer, the uniform of studied indifference to material possessions—then today’s tech billionaires have flipped the script.

These days, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a jiujitsu-practicing, Richard Mille–wearing, powerlifting tycoon whose aesthetic suggests something between a Bond villain and a UFC champion. Elon Musk, the self-styled messiah of Mars and free-speech absolutism, oscillates between Belstaff leather flight jackets that scream “aging rock star managing his seventh divorce” and all-black Tom Ford suits that suggest “billionaire villain in a sci-fi movie who insists he’s the hero.”

Then there’s Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, once a dorky, fleece-vested book salesman, who has since undergone a biceps-first metamorphosis into a Vin Diesel–adjacent yacht lord. These days, he’s a fixture at Milan Fashion Week, turning up at Dolce & Gabbana shows in impeccably tailored trousers and a D&G leather bomber jacket. The New York Times has gone as far as to label him a style icon. It’s a stark contrast to 1999 when he revealed to WIRED his love for shirts with “hidden snaps” under the collar points for easy tie removal.

Bezos can now be seen at D&G fashion shows … Photograph: ALESSANDRO GAROFALO … a far cry from when he rocked shirts with snaps under the collar points for easy tie removal. Photograph: Paul Souders/Getty Images

The new tech oligarchy, forged in the crucible of Trump-era chaos, has moved beyond the faux humility of Patagonia vests and Allbirds. They are dressing like titans, strongmen, and emperors because, in their minds, that’s exactly what they are. Their outfits do not merely say I have wealth. They declare “I have power, and I intend to wield it.”

Parable of Power

In many ways, this aesthetic evolution tells a larger story about the consolidation of power in the tech industry. There was a time when tech billionaires maintained a carefully curated image of modesty—Elon Musk, for instance, once claimed to live in a tiny house on his sprawling estate. When asked why he wore the same thing every day, Zuckerberg responded: “I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.”

But now, that mindset has shifted. “They’re openly embracing their status as modern-day oligarchs, fully leaning into wealth, power, and influence. And they’re celebrating it with some seriously big watch purchases,” says WIRED’s watch expert, Tim Barber. Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in figures like Zuckerberg, who, while systematically dismantling fact-checking protections across Meta platforms, is doing so with an exceptionally rare $895,000 Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 timepiece strapped to his wrist.

A Chinese AI chatbot called DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of the charts on Apple’s App Store — beating the ever-popular ChatGPT, among other competitors.

But what had Silicon Valley leaders breaking out in a cold sweat over the weekend were claims that the open-source large language model it’s based on, DeepSeek V3, was trained with a fraction of the computing power they’ve been relying on, developed for what was reportedly less than $6 million.

Western AI models, on the other hand, have sucked up billions of funding, with companies including OpenAI looking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years to build out the infrastructure required to train these behemoth models and keep them running.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Just last week, US president Donald Trump announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure deal, dubbed Stargate, that involved the ChatGPT maker — alongside investment company SoftBank, tech giant Oracle, and others — spending a planned $500 billion on AI datacenters over the next few years. Not to be outdone, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that the company would be spending a record $60 billion on AI this year alone.

DeepSeek bringing something impressive to market for far less raises an unnerving question for all those check writers: what if AI can actually be done for cheap, without all that epic infrastructure?

AI chipmaker Nivida, in particular, felt the ground shake when trading began on Monday, with shares dropping around eleven percent in early trading. Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, slid almost four percent. SoftBank and Oracle plummeted around nine and seven percent, respectively.

DeepSeek claims its latest R1 model has a performance that’s on par with OpenAI’s o1 model, which was released last fall.

If true — to be clear, there are plenty of experts out there who claim the Chinese outfit may be fudging the numbers — the latest AI chatbot could be a point of reckoning for the likes of OpenAI, who are riding an enormous wave of AI hype and lavish, multibillion-dollar deals.

“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the [capital expenditure] euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” investment bank Jefferies analysts wrote in a note to investors, noting increasing “pressure on AI players to justify ever-increasing capex plans.”

Other analyst groups claimed the latest hype surrounding DeepSeek was overblown.

“In short, we believe that 1) DeepSeek DID NOT ‘build OpenAI for $5M’; 2) the models look fantastic but we don’t think they are miracles; and 3) the resulting Twitterverse panic over the weekend seems overblown,” Bernstein analysts wrote.

Nonetheless, DeepSeek has sent ripples across the AI chatbot landscape and its leaders are broadcasting a clear message.

“OpenAI is not a god, they won’t necessarily always be at the forefront,” the company’s founder Lian Wenfeng told JP Morgan analysts.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has so far remained silent on the matter.

It’s certainly a story to watch, as ungodly sums of money are being poured into building AI infrastructure in the US. Could the datacenters currently being built already be out of date as soon as they come online? Could OpenAI match DeepSeek’s extremely lean operating model? How long would that take?

For now, the Chinese company is certainly an outlier.

“The number of companies who have $6 million to spend is vastly greater than the number of companies who have $100 million or $1 billion to spend,” Page One Ventures investor Chris Nicholson told the New York Times.

In short, DeepSeek has thrown down the gauntlet, and investors of US-based AI companies will be asking plenty of questions going forward.

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