Key Takeaways The stocks of software companies such as Salesforce have soared this week on hopes that Chinese start-up DeepSeek's cost-efficient AI model could make AI applications significantly less expensive to develop and run.

And two kinds of stocks have plenty of momentum these days: mega-cap monsters with market caps of $200 billion or more and stocks with a major focus on artificial intelligence (AI). But can the high-flying ways of these stocks continue?

DeepSeek’s more efficient approach challenges the conventional wisdom that bigger and more expensive necessarily means better in AI development. The Chinese AI lab DeepSeek recently made waves by releasing their DeepSeek-R1 model as open-source software.