In January, the Chinese company Deepseek released a reasoning AI model, called R1, that performs comparably to OpenAI's GPT-4o Turbo model on certain AI benchmarks but was developed with fewer resources at a much lower cost. Marc Andreessen called it 'one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen,' even as NVIDIA's stock plummeted by 17 percent ' the largest ever one-day loss for a U.S. company. About one-fourth of all clinical trials and early drug development now happens in China. Large pharmaceutical companies in-license about a third of their experimental molecules from Chinese laboratories (meaning they purchase the rights to molecules developed by other research groups rather than discover them in-house), according to a report by Stifel. Just a couple of years ago, this number was about 10 percent. "Ten years ago, a major [pharmaceutical company] seeking their next breakthrough molecule would have turned to an American or European biotech,' writes...
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