Reading between the lines, it sounds like there's less of a concern at this time for the profitability of this particular venture, and more of a national interest in making state-of-the-art AI viable on last-gen silicon. The win condition is to render US sanctions strategically toothless; DeepSeek itself one day achieving commercial success would just be gravy.

If that is the game they're playing, I'm all for it. Maybe it's not the result that the sanctions were intended to have, but motivating China to share their research rather than keep it proprietary is certainly a win. Making AI more efficient doesn't reduce the value of compute infrastructure; it means we can generate that much more value from the same hardware.