alt Hacker NewsArticle grabbed at random that provides some more context (tho could use more):
https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundrais...
"The Hangzhou AI lab has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that it is suspending the deal, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Saturday, days after remarks attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about US-China AI competition circulated widely online."
And:
"Tencent's technology outlet published a 118-item version covering AGI strategy, chip supply, pricing, and retention. In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources.""
"The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing."
this bodes well for continuing to refine smaller models and open sourcing them.
There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"; the chinese should realize that the forefront is bloated and there's likely hundreds of speed ups viable. Pushing open weights will continue to grind down the bloat.