I don't disagree, but the important point is that Deepseek showed that it's not just about CapEx, which is what the US firms were/are lining up to battle with.
In my opinion there is something qualitatively better about Deepseek in spite of its small size, even compared to o1-pro, that suggests a door has been opened.
GPUs are needed to rapidly iterate on ideas, train, evaluate, etc., but Deepseek has shown us that we are not yet in the phase where hardware CapEx guarantees victory. Imagine if Deeepseek hadn't been open sourced!
Let me qualify your statement... CapEx is what EXISTING US firms were/are lining up to battle with.
With R1 as inspiration/imperative, many new US startups will emerge who will be very strong. Can you feel a bunch of talent in limbo startups pivoting/re-energized now?
> Can you feel a bunch of talent in limbo startups pivoting/re-energized now?
True! It certainly should be, as there is a lot less reason to hitch one's wagon to one of the few big firms that can afford nation state scale GPU compute.
Back in the day there were a lot of things that appeared not to be about capex because the quality of the capital was improving so quickly. Computers became obsolete after a year or two. Then the major exponential trends finished running their course and computers stayed useful for longer. At that point, suddenly AWS popped up and it turned out computing was all about massive capital investments.
AI will be similar. In the fullness of time, for the major players it'll be all about capex. The question is really just what time horizon that equilibrium will form.
How do you know the CCP didn’t just help out with lots of compute and then tell the companies to lie about how much it cost to train the model?
Reagan did the same with Star Wars, in order to throw the USSR into exactly the same kind of competition hysteria and try to bankrupt it. And USA today is very much in debt as it is… seems like a similar move:
In my opinion there is something qualitatively better about Deepseek in spite of its small size, even compared to o1-pro, that suggests a door has been opened.
GPUs are needed to rapidly iterate on ideas, train, evaluate, etc., but Deepseek has shown us that we are not yet in the phase where hardware CapEx guarantees victory. Imagine if Deeepseek hadn't been open sourced!