alt Hacker NewsI am no-where near as concerned by this as I was a year ago, when I was expecting the axe to fall at any moment before the Chinese labs achieved some sort of escape velocity. I now think it's too late, all the cats are out of all the bags, there's no moat except maybe a temporal one of a few months, the genie is out of the bottle.
There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have soon enough. Deepseek 4 and Kimi 2.5 are not quite Claude 4.5/GPT5.5 but there's no fundamental principle missing - they are strong evidence that there's no real advantage the "frontier" labs possess that isn't related to scale, which they will gain in time (if they even need to). The RL post-training techniques that work are widely known and easily copied. All Deepseek is really lacking is data, which they're getting - and the harder Anthropic/the USG makes it to access claude in china, the more of that precious data they'll get!
I used to sort of entertain the "fast take-off breakaway" scenario as being plausible but not really anymore. The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up, which isn't nothing, far from it, but it's not some unbreakable technological wall. Too late guys - it might have been too late for quite some time.
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Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.
What about access to GPUs and memory? This is becoming a pretty major bottleneck.
> The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up
And even then, their is no stickiness. For most use cases there isn’t much value in one frontier model over the other.
Just have to look at the people flocking from one to the other for whatever reason.
I agree the genie is out of the bottle technologically. I'm less convinced that means access stops being politically and economically important. The bottle may be gone but the best lamps are still expensive
> There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have soon enough
This is not just about mainland China though. The current US government is extremely selfish and self-centered. Other countries really need to consider for their own long-term situation here.
I wish it was true. I would gladly use a GPT 5.2 high model equivalent for coding (6 months old) if it was offered cheaper by Deepseek or Kimi. And I'm sure that's an extremely prevalent opinion by the millions of Claude and Codex users who are bothered by the costs.
However, they just don't perform that well in practice. That's the real issue. You can actually see it when you move away from open benchmarks. Deep seek 3.2 is 4% on Arc-AGI 2 [1], while GPT 5.2 high is 52% and GPT 5.5 pro high is 84.6%. That's the real reason why nobody is using these models for serious work. It's incredibly frustrating.
In addition, I already feel the pain myself on the model restriction. I'll asking my codex 5.5 agent to crawl a website - BOOM, cybersecurity warning on my account. I'll ask it to fix SSH on my local network - another warning. I'm worried about the day my account would be randomly banned and I cannot create a new one. OpenAI already asks you to perform full identification in order to eliminate these warnings - probably exactly for that - so that if they ban you, it's permanent.
[1] https://arcprize.org/leaderboard