Comment by torginus
1 day ago
I think DeepSeek is trying to push the idea that LLMs are not marketable products themselves, but are a part of the 'digital commons', as in a hard to develop and maintain software which in of itself does not produce value, but can be the foundation of a product that does. This is very similar to what Facebook is doing with Llama, or what is going on with big open source projects, like databases or the Linux kernel.
I also think that the companies that are doing that have a different idea on how to make money. Facebook's competitive edge lies in all the people using their social media, and for the Chinese, I think their edge lies in manufacturing physical products, so they try to commodify the software component.
Which is in stark contrast to the US, who have a world-beating software and silicon industry, but are merely competent in other areas, so it makes sense for them to want to avoid that.
Rather than a foundation for their products, I think they're just trying to make it impossible for new competitors to enter that market because if when all the biggest models are open-sourced, a new player can't convince investors to bring billions on the table as there's nothing to monetize – the alternative is free.
Why enter the market now when AI is already commoditized? DeepSeek is making US investors regrets investing so much to get a tiny lead over them, but they're also making future, large investments much harder to justify when you can rely on existing open-sourced models
that's a good thing, no?
Foundation Models aren't defensible. It'll force VCs to allocate on other stuff (the new buzz is "the application layer")
Open-source does very little good if no one actually contribute to the code except the company who controls it and no one else has the means to participate (other than taking the code as-it-is).
The giant players are more than happy to keep their models open if no one even tries to compete.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~~ Goethe
It also is similar what Saudi Arabia and OPED did with fracking. When American fracking companies were full of debt, OPED got down the price of oil and a log of enterprises had to default.