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Notes -
You are noticing that none of these companies want to race. The whole competition to build Sand God is largely kayfabe. Western AI scene is not really a market, it's a highly inefficient cartel (with massive state connections too), which builds up enormous capacity but drags its feet on products because none of them ultimately believe their business models are sustainable in the case of rapid commoditization. This is why DeepSeek was such a disruption: not only was it absurdly cheap (current estimates put their annual operations cost at like $200M), not only were they Chinese, but they dared to actively work to bring the costs of frontier capabilities to zero, make it logistically mundane, in alignment with Liang Wenfeng's personal aesthetic and nationalist preferences.
I think R1's release has sped up every Western frontier lab by 20-50% simply by denying them this warm feeling that they can feed the user base some slop about hidden wonder weapons in their basements, release incremental updates bit by bit, and focus on sales. Now we are beginning to see a bit more of their actual (still disappointingly low, not a single one of these companies could have plausibly made R1 on that cluster I think) power level.
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