I think this is the best economic function of open source—it forces innovation by elimination of rent seeking.
If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
DeepSeek's altruism has taken them far, but they have costs, too, and High Flyer / their personal warchest can only take them so far. And that's before any potential government intervention - it's very likely that this will become a natsec concern for all nations involved.
Spending way too much time trying to track down a very particular version of a GPU driver or similar just isn't going to be worth it if you can make an API call to some remote endpoint that's already done the heavy lifting.
Plenty of value in handling the hard part so your customer doesn't have to.
I don't know how much of the current focus on local models comes from privacy concerns, but at least some does. Once there's something like the gdpr but for data provided for inference, I think even more people will put down the docker containers and pick up the rest endpoints.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.
Your code assistant that can output a file's worth of code will pale in comparison to systems that can create entire projects in seconds. If it costs billions to reproduce the latter, who's going to do it and give it away for free?
There's a possible solution here in the form of distributed training, but that's still tentative and will always be at a lag to the centralised training the big players can do.
Why not Deepseek? Sometimes rich tech bros have billion dollar hobbies instead of billion dollar yachts or billion dollar foundations. Just takes a few not monetarily motivated but has more money then sense visionaries types willing to turn their very, very expensive hobbies into charities. Now if we enter the 100s of billions / trillions territory...