DeepSeek could spark a shift from hardware to software, similar to what happened to traditional computing beginning in the 1990s.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

DeepSeek has secured a “completely open” database that exposed user chat histories, API authentication keys, system logs, and other sensitive information, according to cloud security firm Wiz. The security researchers said they found the Chinese AI startup’s publicly accessible database in “minutes,” with no authentication required.