Comment by pu_pe
7 hours ago
There are two problems with that scenario:
1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model. In a scenario where you already have other major disadvantages (access to capital, labor), you might be outcompeted
2. Open models have been keeping pace very nicely, but they rely on distillation of frontier models. If the race gets really tight, this could be affected so that the time gap grows larger (ie, it's very unlikely anyone but Anthropic is distilling from Mythos at the moment)
> 1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model.
If the small (and I'd even say, sometimes imperceptible) difference between Opus & DeepSeek v4 Pro is such a disadvantage for your startup, it's that your startup have an issue, not the LLM.
At the end of the day, your startup is there to solve real problems and even before the LLMs, being fast at coding things have never been such a huge competitive advantage compared to marketing, sales, customer support, product vision ...
The direction we are going suggests AI will also be used for marketing, sales, customer support and product vision.
Besides, if the difference between Opus and DeepSeek 4 is so small and imperceptible, you are missing the opportunity to launch a startup on your own and compete with Claude Code.