[c7b]

The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.

[merelydev]

> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.

[jingpostmedia]

The framing that Chinese labs open-source because they're behind assumes it's purely a competitive tactic. But there's a structural dimension: DeepSeek operates under a completely different funding model than US labs. They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.

Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.

[NitpickLawyer]

> They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.

That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah, they were in a tough position though. All their competitors were offering equity and they didn't.