Government regulation.

'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.

Surely that will end in fragmentation along national lines if monopolies are defined by governments.

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.

The government isn't giving 500 billion to anyone. They just let Trump announce a private deal he has no involvement.

Correct, as I stated the government is just giving their 'blessing'.

You figure that out and the VC's will be shovelling money into your face.

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.

> 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.

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?

Can anyone do that though? You need the tokens and the pipelines to feed them to the matmul mincers. Quoting only dollar equivalent of GPU time is disingenuous at best.

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.

Even if that's 10x, that's easy to counter. $50M can be invested by almost anyone. There are thousands of entities (incl. governments, even regional ones) who could easily bring such capital.

> Surely that's only possible when you have a large barrier to entry?

As you grow bigger, you create barriers to entry where none existed before, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

So I'm not an expert in this but even with DeepSeek supposedly reducing training costs isn't the estimate still in the millions (and that's presumably not counting a lot of costs)? And that wouldn't be counting a bunch of other barriers for actually building the business since training a model is only one part, the barrier to entry still seems very high.

Also barriers to entry aren't the only way to get a consolidated market anyway.

About your first point, IMO the usefulness of AI will remain relatively limited as long as we don’t have continuously learning AI. And once we have that, the disparity between training and inference may effectively disappear. Whether that means that such AI will become more accessible/affordable or less is a different question.

We have that now, DeepSeek just proved it.