Except it’s not really a fair comparison, since DeepSeek is able to take advantage of a lot of the research pioneered by those companies with infinite budgets who have been researching this stuff in some cases for decades now.

The key insight is that those building foundational models and original research are always first, and then models like DeepSeek always appear 6 to 12 months later. This latest move towards reasoning models is a perfect example.

Or perhaps DeepSeek is also doing all their own original research and it’s just coincidence they end up with something similar yet always a little bit behind.