It's always been possible to "do (worse) AI on less compute". We've had years of open models! I also don't understand how anyone can see this as anything but good news for OpenAI. The ultimate value proposition of AI has always depended on whether it stretches to AGI and beyond, and R1 demonstrates that there's several orders of magnitude of hardware overhang. This makes it easier for OpenAI to succeed, not harder, because it makes it less likely that they'll scale to their financial limits and still fail to surpass humans.