[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.