DeepSeek and MCP headline Indian Express top 5 AI breakthroughs of 2025

This year‑ender neatly captures how 2025 shifted the center of gravity in AI. DeepSeek-R1 showed that open‑weight reasoning models from China can threaten Western incumbents not just academically but commercially, by offering comparable performance with far lower training cost. At the same time, the rise of MCP as a widely adopted standard for tools and data access signals that the ecosystem is coalescing around shared plumbing for agents, not just competing monolithic models. ([indianexpress.com](https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/deepseek-ghibli-art-5-biggest-ai-breakthroughs-2025-10448067/))

The piece also underlines how quickly AI is bleeding into new domains: math competition–level problem solving, mass‑market image generation that can melt GPU clusters via viral memes, and even training language models in orbit to sidestep Earth‑bound resource constraints. Taken together, these trends point toward an environment where capability gains are no longer bottlenecked solely by model architecture; they’re equally constrained by data access, integration standards, and physical infrastructure. That combination tends to accelerate the race—multiple actors can innovate in parallel once shared standards like MCP lower integration friction, while cheaper or off‑planet compute widens the set of players who can seriously chase AGI‑class systems.