Deepseek was inevitable. With the big scale solutions costing so much capital smart people were forced to develop alternative strategies for developing large language models that can potentially compete with the current state of the art frontier models. Simon Sinofksy writes:

The only unknown was who was going to do it. The choices were a startup or someone outside the current center of leadership and innovation in AI, which is mostly in the US clustered around trillion-dollar companies. It turned out to be a group in China, which for many (me too) is unfortunate.

While Sinofsky emphasizes market forces, the NVIDIA embargo that blocked China’s access to cutting-edge GPUs clearly played a pivotal role in precipitating Deepseek as well. Regardless, it’s clear that the constraints that people thought would be hard ones are no longer. The question is: how will this reshape the dynamics of AI innovation globally?