If the DeepSeek approach to training hyperscaler models "cheaply" after all the hype wears down works, we just need to follow in their footsteps and build open source alternatives to everything.
Frontier models take a lot of money and experimentation. But then people figure out how to train them and knowledge of those models and approaches leaks. Furthermore, we can make informed guesses. But best of all, we can exfiltrate the model's output and distill the model.
If we work together as an industry to open source everything, we can overcome this.
OpenAI has to 100x in five years or they're going to be in trouble.
Models are making it easy to replace SaaS, but also easy to replace other AI companies.
There may be no moat for any of this. The lead is only because they're a few generations ahead, running as fast as they can on the treadmill.
I don't think this hurts China at all.