The week China entered the AI race – and spooked Silicon Valley

When we published this prescient editorial on Sunday about a new Chinese upstart in the global AI race, DeepSeek was still so unknown to non-AI obsessives that the editor working on the piece thought it would be clearer for readers to keep its name out of the story’s original headline.

Yet, within hours of that leader being published, DeepSeek’s R1 – a ChatGPT-level model seemingly produced for a fraction of the cost of its US rivals – was the sudden focus of global attention as it wiped $1tn off US stocks. It was, said one major investor, a “Sputnik moment”.

Our technology and business reporters have spent the past few days analysing the impact of DeepSeek both within the world of artificial intelligence and for the US tech behemoths … as well as global geopolitics.

Our senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins, took a deeper look at the origins of DeepSeek, charting the rise of what started in 2023 as a passion project of millennial hedge-fund entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng. Donna Lu, science writer for Guardian Australia, tried the app out and tested its political limits by asking it about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan: you can see the results in this video. US tech editor, Blake Montgomery, asked what the response to R1 would be in Washington, especially as it still struggles with what to do about TikTok, and our tech team in the UK – Dan Milmo and Robert Booth – spoke to AI experts about the safety impact of a new generation of disruptive bots.

Whatever the truth of the app’s cost, wrote Larry Elliott, the west is already losing the battle to control the AI waves … and that could spell trouble. As technology writer James Vincent put it in a measured opinion piece warning about the outsized reaction to DeepSeek, “what this really shows is that the world of AI is febrile, unpredictable and overly reactive … If R1 doesn’t cause a destructive meltdown of this system, it’s likely that some future launch will.”

Meanwhile, the writers, artists and publishers still making sense of how their work is being used to train the AI models must have been amused by the OpenAI’s complaints that Chinese AI firms are using its intellectual property to develop their own products. Perhaps our most caustic reaction to the story chaos came from our cartoonist First Dog on the Moon who asked “Will DeepSeek save us from the smug tech broligarchy?” Before concluding, “no, but at least we got to laugh at some of the worst people in the world briefly”.

Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps, where an estimated 1 million Jews were killed between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 others. With the memories of the atrocity fading, 50 survivors made the arduous journey back, Europe correspondent Jon Henley was in Poland to cover the memorial ceremony. At a time of rising antisemitism and rightwing xenophobia, survivors said it was more important than ever for the world to listen to their stories. Speaking to Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly, three of them gave deeply moving testimonies. That rising threat of antisemitism today has been illustrated in Australia by a string of graffiti and arson attacks against synagogues and other targets in Sydney and Melbourne. Jordyn Beazley reported on the discovery by police in Sydney of a caravan laden with explosives and allegedly intended for a large-scale antisemitic attack.

Our reporters and livebloggers have been closely following the aftermath of Wednesday’s disastrous air crash in Washington DC. Paul Scruton, Finbarr Sheehy and Laure Boulinier produced a clear visual guide to what happened, and David Smith’s political sketch captured the grim spectacle of Donald Trump trying to affix blame for the accident on Democrats and diversity policies at the Federal Aviation Authority.

Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem reported powerfully on the tens of thousands of displaced people making the journey on foot to return to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza. Malak has herself been displaced and she wrote about her own terrible experience of returning home to Beit Lahia among that huge crowd to find her family home devastated: “The only things still standing were the trunks of a walnut tree, and some olive trees that used to be in our yard. Seeing them there, surrounded only by rubble, I felt like I had been stabbed in my heart.”

There were terrible scenes at the Kumbh Mela festival in the north Indian city of Prayagraj, where dozens died in crowd crushes. India correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen and photographer David Levene reported from the scene as the disaster unfolded.

The rapidly escalating conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exploded this week with the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group seizing the border city of Goma. East Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, wrote an explainer of who M23 are and why they are advancing, while our editorial lamented a horrific crisis fuelled by western demand for the DRC’s vast natural resources.

Thirty-five years after the Velvet Revolution, Slovakia is backsliding into authoritarianism under prime minister, Robert Fico. Writer Monika Kompaníková covered this drift and the purge of state-run arts institutes in her country in this striking column. Further south, in Serbia, a wave of student-led protests have led to the resignation of prime minister, Miloš Vučević, a close ally of autocratic president Aleksandar Vučić. Ingrid Gercama spoke to protesters in Belgrade demanding accountability from their government.

Rob Davies continued to delve into the financial affairs of the former Chelsea owner and Vladimir Putin-linked oligarch Roman Abramovich, revealing how he dodged taxes on the cost of running his fleet of superyachts and may owe the UK £1bn in unpaid taxes.

I can recommend two fascinating essays published by our US team this week. In the first, historian David Motadel considered if the world is at an “inflection point” akin to 1848 or 1945, as politicians including Joe Biden have warned. And in the second, Becca Lewis revisited the early years of Silicon Valley to understand the rightwing origins of tech and its obsession with masculinity.

I read Louise Lancaster’s powerful, devastating prison diary wondering why this woman was in jail at all. Louise is one of the British environmental protesters who have been handed some of the longest sentences ever given in Britain for a non-violent protest. I was similarly appalled by columnist Frances Ryan’s wrenching story of Rosy, a Guardian reader who cannot move, breathe or eat unassisted – but who NHS assessors believe can be left entirely on her own, and in the Observer, Anna Fazackerley’s report on the harrowing cases of women in England having their babies taken away in the days after childbirth, and why this is on the rise.

Our feature on the story of Ruby Franke, a family vlogger who was jailed for child abuse, is a shocking story of what goes on behind the scenes of an influencer’s apparently perfect life. A gripping piece by Simon Hattenstone.

Kate McCusker tortured herself for a very funny feature on gen Z’s attitude to communication. She spent a whole week phoning friends and family rather than texting or messaging them, while some great pictures from Alicia Canter captured this challenging assignment. Amy Fleming asked if being glued to screens is really giving us brain rot, reaching a surprising conclusion. And Aida Edemariam wrote a fascinating article about how the split between treating physical and mental illnesses is being broken down – and what that means for treating complex medical conditions.

I loved Laura Snapes’s joyous piece on how, after decades of indifference to Bob Dylan, she went to see the new biopic A Complete Unknown and now she is, completely and utterly, tangled up in Bob.

One more thing … The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is an hilarious Irish romp about how secrets can never really be avoided, even if they’re never actually revealed. The characters become part of your life – it’s an extremely enjoyable novel.

Cook this | Rukmini Iyer’s roast cauliflower and paneer curry

One tin and half an hour is all you need for Rukmini Iyer’s clever week-night curry. Rukmini’s top trick for shop-bought paneer? “Once cut, soak it in boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain and pat dry – it improves the texture no end.”

Listen to this | Protein, weights and the best way to keep fit

In the second episode of Science Weekly’s listener questions special, Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay what he has uncovered about who the exercise guidelines were created for and whether they apply to all of us, which exercises are best for keeping us strong, whether we should be eating particular foods when we exercise, and how much protein we need to consume if we’re packing in the hours at the gym.

Watch this | How immigration is used as a political weapon

Efforts at stopping population movement by force often fail to stop people migrating across borders. But for many politicians, that can be a good thing. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how immigration is being exploited by business to political agendas, and as a weapon of war.

The Guardian’s crosswords and Wordiply are here to keep you entertained throughout the weekend.