Surely that's only possible when you have a large barrier to entry?
What's going to be that barrier in this case - cos it turns out not to be neither training costs/hardware or secret expertise.
'Can't have your data going to China'
'Can't allow companies that do censorship aligned with foreign nations'
'This company violated our laws and used an American company's tech for their training unfairly'
And the government choosing winners.
'The government in announcing 500 billion going to these chosen winners, anyone else take the hint, give up, you won't get government contracts but will get pressure'.
Good thing nobody is making these sorts of arguments today.
Sure US economic power has a long reach right now because of the importance of the dollar etc - but the more it uses that to bully, the more countries are making sure they are independent.
I suspect the "it ain't training costs/hardware" bit is a bit exagerated since it ignores all the prior work that DeepSeek was built on top of.
But, if all else fails, there's always the tried-and-true approaches: regulatory capture, industry entrenchment, use your VC bucks to be the last one who can wait out the costs the incumbents do face before they fold, etc.
How does it ignore it? The success of Deepseek proves that training costs/hardware are definitely NOT a barrier to entry that protects OpenAI from competition. If anyone can train their model with ChatGPT for a fraction of the cost it took to train ChatGPT and get similar results, then how is that a barrier?
That’s not to say they lie about everything, obviously the thing works amazingly well. The cost is understated by 10x or more, which is still not bad at all I guess? But not mind blowing.
Also barriers to entry aren't the only way to get a consolidated market anyway.
As you grow bigger, you create barriers to entry where none existed before, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
