How AI is impacting travel startups

It is being billed as artificial intelligence’s “Sputnik moment”, the day when the hype bubble burst and American companies in the sector and their investors recognized that other countries wanted to challenge their dominance.

Last month, on January 27, a trillion dollars was wiped off the values of companies in the semiconductor, power and infrastructure sectors exposed to AI, more than half of it from chipmaker Nvidia — the biggest one-day loss in the history of the United States.

Veteran investor Marc Andreessen made the space race-era reference on X following the launch by China’s DeepSeek of R1, an open-source reasoning model that is “on par with” OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1, the…