DeepSeek just showed the compute edge is not that hard to match. They could have chosen to keep the gains proprietary but probably made good money playing the market instead, quants as they are.
If you’re using your compute capacity at 1.25% efficiency, you are not going to win because your iteration time is just going to be too long to stay competitive.
Software and algorithmic improvements diffuse faster than hardware, even with attempts to keep them secret. Maybe a company doubles the efficiency, but in 3 months, it's leaked and everyone is using it. And then the compute edge becomes that much more durable.
They achieved the same results for 1.25% of the computation cost... If they actually had that computation capacity, it would be game over with the AGI race by the same logic.
