> If they just benefited from repurposing OpenAI data, that's different than having achieved an engineering breakthrough

One way or another, they were able to create something that has WAY cheaper inference costs than o1 at the same level of intelligence. I was paying Anthropic $15/1M tokens to make myself 10x faster at writing software, which was coming out to $10/day. O1 is $60/1M tokens, which for my level of usage would mean that it costs as much as a whole junior software engineer. DeepSeek is able to do it for $2.50/1M tokens.

Either OpenAI was taking a profit margin that would make the US Healthcare industry weep, or DeepSeek made an engineering breakthrough that increases inference efficiency by orders of magnitude.