The market capitalization of AI agents has seen a dramatic decline of more than $2.5 billion in the past 24 hours, falling to just over $10.2 billion. This sharp downturn coincides with the rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese LLM model that is gaining popularity due to its significantly lower costs and superior performance benchmarks compared to OpenAI, Google, and Meta models. Market Reacts DeepSeek charges only 14 cents per million input tokens, a stark contrast to GPT-4, which costs $15 per million input tokens. This pricing gap has prompted a re-evaluation of AI investments, impacting both cryptocurrency assets and technology stocks. Notable AI agents have experienced significant losses, with AIXBT dropping 18.5%, AI16Z falling 24%, VIRTUAL slipping 14%, and GRIFFAIN seeing a 25% decrease in the past 24 hours. Fartcoin experienced the largest drop, plummeting by 31%, according to CoinGecko . The wider AI crypto token market has also shown signs of weakness, with Near Protocol falling 10%, Internet Computer down 7%, Render dropping 14%, and Artificial Superintelligence Alliance down by 10%. Meanwhile, NASDAQ dropped 3.6% on Monday, and Nvidia saw its stock plunge by nearly 20%, falling to $118 by mid-morning. U.S Vs China Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States would lead the world in AI and crypto, with a $500 billion investment into Project Stargate to support OpenAI and reinforce American AI supremacy. However, given the rise of DeepSeek, with its lower resource requirements and relatively better performance, suggests that even large-scale U.S. investments might struggle to stave off further disruption. DeepSeek has also already surpassed ChatGPT as the top app on the App Store and overtaken OpenAI in U.S. Google search interest over the past week.
