Monsieur Bertrand dazu:
Alles anzeigen[...] Deepseek isn't the one that needs to make a ROI on half a trillion dollars worth of data centers (or whatever fraction of that amount actually materializes) with a product that's now offered free by the competition
And that's probably exactly the point of Deepseek's strategy: to fundamentally change the economics of the market so as to make OpenAI's model obsolete.
Let's play this out and assume that Deepseek's strategy works out, and from where I stand it's looking like it's starting to. What "working out" means is scores of AI projects now starting to use Deepseek's model (in Open-Source or via their API) to power their AI endeavors, resulting in an ecosystem effect and them becoming a standards setter.
It's also them proving that many AI applications don't require massive data centers. While the most powerful models still need significant infrastructure, Deepseek's smaller versions can run locally on personal computers and gaming PCs, making OpenAI's $500B investment look highly questionable for many use cases.
And there's a brilliant strategic angle here: while OpenAI pours billions into centralized infrastructure, Deepseek is democratizing AI by enabling local deployment. This allows them to expand their reach without massive infrastructure investments: their users make it for them.
If you're OpenAI, this all ought to make you sweat. You're basically IBM in the late 1970s watching personal computers starting to democratize computing. Your $500B bet on centralized computing power might be happening just as the market shifts toward distributed, commodity AI.
And you're stuck: you can either dramatically cut your prices to compete (as a reminder, Deepseek charges just 3% of OpenAI's prices for their API calls, good luck making ROI on $500B of infrastructure if you match them), or try to differentiate by coming up with better models - bearing in mind that Deepseek has a track record of catching up to your models in a matter of days or weeks.
All in all it looks like OpenAI's expensive infrastructure might end up being the ultimate liability rather than the moat they hoped for.
To come back to the original question of monetization, what this all means is that Deepseek's approach is almost like that of guerrilla forces choosing terrain that turns an enemy's superior firepower into a liability. They're changing the game to impose their vision of AI as an open commodity that runs everywhere versus OpenAI's vision of a closed service controlled centrally. While OpenAI builds massive, expensive bases, Deepseek is empowering local resistance through distributed, efficient deployment. History shows how that usually ends.