[jorvi]

OpenAI and Anthropic have no moat. DeepSeek is a drop-in replacement that is really close in performance for 7.5-20% of the cost. That cost will continue to get pushed down by the Chinese. And bizarrely enough their models are more secure to use because they're open source open weights.

OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get crushed long-term, and their investors are going to take a horrendous haircut.

On the other hand, Google and Microsoft already have the users (and lock-in). They just need to funnel them into Gemini and CoPilot.

[pants2]

DeepSeek r1 affected markets because for a little while people bought this, but it's not true for so many reasons. Sending data to China is out of the question for every American Enterprise. OAI and Anthropic have rich product suites and API harnesses that make DS far from a "drop in replacement." They have better models, generous usage limits, domination of the zeitgeist, integrations with Slack and all the Enterprise SaaS platforms, and magnitudes more GPU capacity than DS. What you say simply isn't true.

[jorvi]

> What you say simply isn't true.

Everything you said is wrong.

- DeepSeek is on V4 now, R1 is ancient history

- The models are open source open weights, which mean you can inspect what the models do and you you can choose US or EU infra providers

- DeepSeek literally has a Claude-compatible endpoint

Please don't comment and confuse other users on topics you know nothing about. Study. Then speak.

[pants2]

- Right, R1 affected markets because the market originally believed your theory, but it doesn't any more, which is why V4 didn't move markets at all.

- Sure, you can use US infra providers. Together.ai is a good US provider but then it's 15X more expensive than DeepSeek's Chinese-subsidized pricing. It's really not that attractive at that price point. Anthropic and OpenAI are focused on larger models, but Grok 4.3[1] is smarter and significantly faster + cheaper than DS4[2] and by a wide margin.

- DeepSeek has a Claude-compatible messages API, but that's trivial. Anthropic has a massive API platform with things like Sessions, Files, and Agents[3]. None of those are available on DeepSeek.

1. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-4-3

2. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-pro

3. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/overview

[jorvi]

Now we're talking!

- V4 will definitely move markets, especially as Claude and OpenAI keep jacking up the prices more and more. But inertia exists. Give it time.

- Most US infra providers are ~5x more expensive than Chinese infra, not 15x. But yes you are right. It does erode the cost advantage significantly. Big asterisk is that V4 seems to have solid cache hit percentage, often in the high 90s.

- Grok (and Llama) always underperform relative to their benchmark and ranking results. Don't ask my why, but it's a persistent pattern me and colleagues have noticed. I'll give them another try though, more competition is better.

- DeepSeek themselves have specifically said they prefer developing high performance models that you plug into other tooling, including Claude's. Regardless, I think it's unrealistic to expect DeepSeek to offer 1:1 suite compatibility with Claude or OpenAI. You wouldn't expect that from OpenAI <> Claude either.

[pants2]

I think the real crux of the moat is model intelligence. I'd bet that most of the money being spent on inference is on the top few models (today Opus-4.7 and GPT-5.5) from people and companies that benefit from using the best models.

Truly the main moat that OAI/Anthropic have is being 6 months months ahead of the competition in performance, which might be indefinite if the competition is just distilling their models (China) or takes many months between releases (Google).

Once you look passed the frontier of performance, it's just a race to the bottom on inference costs because there's at least 5 companies with equivalent open models at that level.

[discordance]

I wish DeepSeek were a drop-in replacement, but it's not. It performs amazingly well but it's not as autonomous and needs a lot more nudges compared to Opus4.6/7 or GPT 5.5. It's good enough for a lot of things (text extraction, sentiment analysis, classifying things) but not on the same level for code gen.