More like a tiny startup from a second tier Chinese city schools tech giants both in America and China. High-Flyer has only 160 employees and only some of those are working on Deepseek. They are beating companies 1000x bigger in budget and employees. All while embracing open models and publishing and having to deal with suspicion due to previous Chinese models cheating with eval data.

It's funny to read the SV cope. They are lying! They have thousands of H100s! Because a random SV CEO said so.

Deepseek's parent company was worth a miser $200m. And it looks like they were forced to pivot because CCP limited salaries in finance while getting no money from VCs.

This might be the biggest underdog upset in tech history.