Now that its been done, is OpenAI needed or can you iterate on DeepSeek only moving forward?
My understanding is this effectively builds on OpenAI's very expensive initial work, provides a "nearly as good as" model for orders of magnitude cheaper to train and run, that also provides a basis to continue building on and improving without openAI, and without human bottlenecks.
That cuts OAI off at the knees in terms of market viability after billions have been spent. If DS can iterate and match the capabilities of the current in-development OAI models in the next year, it may come down to regulatory capture and government intervention to ensure its viability as a company.
You cannot really have government intervention against open source and weights successfully.
the attempt in cryptography with PGP and export controls made that clear.
Even if DS specifically is banned (and even effectively), a dozen other clean room replications following their published methods will become available.
It is possible this government will ban all “unapproved” LLMs not running at authorized provider[1], saying it is weapon and AGI or skynet or whatever makes powers that sound important, thus establishing the need for control [2], the rest of the world will keep innovating.
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[1] Bans just need to work only economically, not at information level i.e organization with liability considerations will not use “unapproved” ones and they are ones who will bulk of the money and that what they need to protect.
[2] if they were smart they could do this positively without the backlash bans would have. By giving protections to compliant models like legal indemnity for for model companies and users without necessarily blocking others
