A Startup Nobody Saw Coming In the summer of 2023, a hedge fund manager in Hangzhou, China, quietly spun off an AI research lab. By January 2025, that lab had triggered what CBS News described as a shockwave through Wall Street, briefly dethroned ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store, and forced a fundamental reassessment of the assumptions underlying hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure investment. The company was DeepSeek. The model was R1. And nothing in the AI industry looked quite the same afterward. For enterprise AI leaders evaluating model strategy, AI governance, and infrastructure spending, understanding DeepSeek is not optional. It is…