DeepSeek is a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT, they needed far few resources than OpenAI. This is essentially what caused the massive selloff in Nvidia, as a new competitor model is just as good and requires a fraction of the massive costs.

I don't remember the correct metric but the cost for DeepSeek was like $15/mo while ChatGPT was $200

You said "they're losing the race." They might lose, but I don't think we're seeing that yet. They undoubtedly gained a competitor over the weekend, but that didn't change their position as the leading AI company overnight.

Correct me if my understanding is wrong, but if OpenAI's accusation is correct and DS is a derivative work, then isn't it inaccurate to say DS reached ChatGPT performance "at a fraction of the cost"? If true, seems like it's more accurate to say that they were able to copy an expensive model, at low expense.

I agree in a way, but then in that case Gemini Claude and Qwen are all derivations of each other and shouldn't be in the competition either.

DeepSeek did some studies on distillation, which might be what OpenAI is complaining about. But their bigger model is not a distilled version of OpenAI's.

To me the big question (which HN can't be bothered to discuss because SaM aLtMaN iS bAd) is whether DS shows that OpenAI can be done cheaply, or just copied cheaply. Your last sentence tells me you think DS built this from scratch. I haven't seen evidence of that.