Artificial intelligence researchers at Meta Platforms have been in panic mode.

In recent days, leaders of some of the company’s AI teams openly worried that new conversational AI made by a Chinese hedge fund meant Meta was falling behind in the AI race. Leaders including AI infrastructure director Mathew Oldham have said they are concerned that the next version of Meta’s flagship AI, Llama, won’t perform as well as the Chinese AI, DeepSeek, according to two Meta employees with direct knowledge of efforts to catch up.