Welcome to the main event: an AI free-for-all where OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic swagger into the ring with their trillion-parameter hype machines—then promptly lose their cool when a ragtag Chinese startup named DeepSeek R1 strolls in, spending less than Sam Altman’s annual hoodie budget.
While OpenAI and Google play SimCity with billion-dollar compute clusters, DeepSeek’s crew apparently cracked the code using ramen money and a Costco pallet of export-controlled GPUs.
Cue the cope-a-palooza.
First out of the meltdown chute is Palmer Luckey, the guy who gave us Oculus VR and then pivoted to building AI drones that the US military can use to blow things up and hurt people. He’s on X ranting that DeepSeek’s success is a Chinese psyop to sink Donald Trump’s future prospects.
That’s a new one. Apparently, you can sell lethal tech to the Pentagon while worrying that someone else making an AI chatbot is the real existential threat. If you’ve got moral whiplash from that, join the club.
It’s a good thing Palmer is on the case, because the rest of the AI industry is too busy trying to figure out how to make a profit from a product that doesn’t work.
One thing that is clear is that the AI industry is in a bubble. The rest of the world is not going to be able to afford the luxury of a $1000/month chatbot.
The only way to make a profit from a product that doesn’t work is to sell it to a government agency and OpenAI is already on the case, recently launching it’s ChatGPT for Government program.