The AI industry witnessed several major breakthroughs on June 6, 2025, with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek continuing to disrupt the global tech landscape.
DeepSeek, which first shook the AI world in January 2025 with its R1 model, has maintained its momentum with new developments. The Hangzhou-based startup recently released an update to its hit R1 reasoning model, demonstrating outstanding performance across various benchmark evaluations, including mathematics, programming, and general logic. This success has upended beliefs that U.S. export controls were holding back China's AI advancements, as DeepSeek released AI models that matched or exceeded industry-leading U.S. models at a fraction of the cost.
Meanwhile, Google has made its Gemini 2.5 Pro available to more developers after seeing enthusiasm and early adoption from those using it for coding assistance and productivity gains. The company has made it available in public preview with increased rate limits. This move appears to be a direct response to DeepSeek's growing influence in the developer community.
Industry experts note that in 2025, AI is evolving from a tool for work and home to an integral part of both. AI-powered agents are doing more with greater autonomy and helping simplify life at home and on the job. On the global stage, AI is helping find new ways to address major challenges from climate crisis to healthcare access, driven by advancements in AI's ability to remember more and reason better.
Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence recently released its 2025 AI Index, a comprehensive 400+ page report on AI's impact, revealing key trends, costs, and impacts of AI in 2025. The report shows that while the United States still has a commanding lead on the quantity of notable models released, Chinese models are catching up on quality. On chatbot benchmarks, the gap between top U.S. and Chinese models has narrowed significantly, from 9.26 percent in January 2024 to just 1.70 percent by February 2025.
These developments signal a significant shift in the global AI landscape, with open-source models and cost-effective approaches gaining traction. DeepSeek's open-source approach, making its technology available for anyone to download, copy, and build upon, has helped it overtake ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store in the US. This democratization of AI technology could accelerate innovation globally and drive advancements in the field more broadly.