The tech industry has long been infatuated with metaphors relating to the original space race. Its favorite one is moon shot, a term it applies to any undertaking of atypical ambition. But Chinese startup DeepSeeks release of a reasoning AI model that may be a peer of OpenAIs GPT-o1despite having been created on the cheap, without access to Nvidias best chipshas everyone reaching back to 1957s original Sputnik moment as a point of comparison.It somehow took most people a week to pay attention to DeepSeeks R1, which the company released on January 20. Once they did, it spawned an insta-frenzy whose shockwaves ranged from the technological to the geopolitical. They include a stock market beating for Nvidia and other chipmakers, new questions about whether vast resources actually provide an edge in AI after all, and shock that the Biden administrations bans on shipping the most powerful U.S.-designed chips to China didnt prevent that countrys researchers from making a possibly epoch-shifting breakthrough with the stuff they had on hand.DeepSeeks abrupt impact has undeniable similarities to the panic set off more than 67 years ago when the U.S.S.R. successfully put a satellite into orbit before the U.S. did. But as former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong pointed out in a post this week, the parallels are shallow. For one thing, the Soviets worked in deep secrecy. By contrast, DeepSeek is publishing code and research relating to its techniques for creating AI that does more with less. That gives the entire world the opportunity to quickly build upon what the company has created, potentially accelerating AIs use everywhere rather than preserving a daunting competitive advantage for one company or country.To be sure, the sudden commodification of AI could have profound implications for the handful of powerful U.S. companies that have hitherto propelled the technology forward. But while the details and timing of such an inflection point were unpredictable, its inevitability was not. For example, an internal Google document leaked in early 2023 was titled We Have No Moat and Neither Does OpenAI. Or, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it when I talked to him later that year, As far as Im concerned, early leads in technology dont matter.DeepSeeks R1and other AI technologies modeled upon its approachmay well force AIs incumbent giants to reassess everything about their future. Yet thats hardly an end game for the industry as weve known it. Artificial intelligence isnt anywhere near hitting an insurmountable wall that prevents further progress, and its tough to imagine that companies with access to vast resources wont be able to unlock some advances that those operating under greater constraints cannot.Most importantly, the dizzying improvements weve seen in LLMs over the past few years have yet to be matched by the real-world AI in applications we use. As generative AIs novelty wears off, tools such as Microsofts Copilot look like rougher and rougher drafts of something that needs further ingenuity to live up to its potential. The work of hooking up AI to all the processes we use to get stuff done has barely begun, and a lot of money stands to be made by the companies who get it done.Thats the underyling fact behind the industrys obsession with so-called agentic AIa slightly annoying buzzword that encompasses forms of the technology that can perform complex tasks without constant human oversight. There are some decent early stabs at the idea out there, such as Asanas AI teammates, which already shoulder some of the grunt work of wrangling tasks in the project-management app. But those examples are outnumbered by instances of agentic AI that mostly prove the technology isnt ready to do much on its own.Last week, for example, OpenAI released Operator, a research preview available to users of its $200/month ChatGPT Pro tier. Operator can type into a web browser and control a mouse pointer, a theoretical first step toward letting it handle all the tasks we humans perform on the web. Over at Platformer, Casey Newton reported on his hands-on experience with the service, which included asking it to perform tasks such as writing a high school lesson plan for The Great Gatsby. It took minutes to achieve results that were no better than what the non-agentic ChatGPT came up with almost instantly. And when Newton tried to use Operator to order groceriessomething a stock chatbot cant doit turned out that the current version of Operator is pretty hopeless at the job, too. In December, I got a demo of Googles experimental agentic AI, Project Mariner, that also involved grocery ordering and was too glacially slow to look like progress. That Operator and Mariner arent yet ready to handle a humble task such as buying a gallon of milk isnt evidence that theyre exercises in futilityjust that the goal of making AI usefully agentic remains largely aspirational, even at OpenAI and Google.DeepSeek and other feats of LLM optimization yet to come wont get in the way of further development of agentic AI. Indeed, theyll surely help by making the underlying infrastructure more accessible to more people with good ideas. Even then, the U.S.s AI kingpins will maintain some distinct advantages, from the money and engineering talent they can throw at tomorrows challenges to their ability to market new products to big, established customer bases. Maybe DeepSeek-R1s arrival marks a turning point for these companies. But only a failure of imagination would doom them to irrelevance.Youve been reading Plugged In,Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou cancheck out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me athmccracken@fastcompany.comwith your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. 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