On the agenda…

Just when you thought the AI arms race had been boiled down to its principal players, a new challenger approaches and shakes everything up.

The tech world has been abuzz this week with the sudden emergence of a Chinese-made AI model called DeepSeek, which claims to be produced at a fraction of the cost of its American counterparts and, in turn, sent the stock market into a frenzy.

DeepSeek, which operates in much the same way as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, claims to have built its AI model for less than $6m (£4.8m) worth of computing power – a far cry from the billions invested in American AI companies – and has led to investors questioning what exactly the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft are spending all this money on.