It was also disruptive because it was open weight, meaning anyone and their dog could theoretically compete with the frontier labs for their inference revenue.

The frontier labs need to recoup a huge amount of cash to cover their model development costs, and justify their valuations. That’s plausible when they’re only ones capable of selling inference on these models, it a lot less plausible when models themselves become cheap commodities, and you’re just competing on your ability to provide compute. Anthropic and OpenAI can’t compete with people like AWS on that front.

cost has nothing to do with why deepseek was disruptive, the fact that it means there is zero moat around anthropic or openai is what's disruptive about it. it means in the mid-term LLMs will be commoditized and customers will flock to the cheapest inference wherever they can find it. there's no reason to stick to the "frontier" labs

DeepSeek didn’t really change any trends though, unless you count the stock market.

It was impressive work, but models were commoditizing and inference costs were dropping rapidly already. They were neither the first nor the last 10x optimization, from what I’ve seen.