Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not better than o1. And given that OpenAI is on the verge of releasing o3, has some “o4” in the pipeline, and Deepseek could only build this because of o1, I don’t think there’s as much competition as people seem to imply. I’m excited to see models become open, but given the curve of progress we’ve seen, even being “a little” behind is a gap that grows exponentially every day.
But it took the deepseek team a few weeks to replicate something at least close to o1. If people can replicate 90% of your product in 6 weeks you have competition.
The moat for these big models were always expected to be capital expenditure for training costing billions. It's why these companies like openAI etc, are spending massively on compute - it's building a bigger moat (or trying to at least).
If it can be shown, which seems to have been, that you could use smarts and make use of compute more efficiently and cheaply, but achieve similar (or even better) results, the hardware moat bouyed by capital is no longer.
i'm actually glad tho. An opensourced version of these weights should ideally spur the type of innovation that stable diffusion did when theirs was released.