I take it from [1] (transcript of recent DeepSeek CEO discussion with investors) that DeepSeek would disagree on the immediate catastrophic impact to the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. The reason is even though technology parity mostly exists, only OpenAI, Anthropic et al have the inference capacity to gain market share and generate revenue. Chinese vendors don't have the chips needed to scale up inference and gain market share, and the DeepSeek CEO doesn't think this would happen in optimistic circumstances in the next 3 years, but thinks it might be possible in 5 years.

In summary, regardless of country of origin, availability of inference capacity is the moat protecting the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, not technology superiority.

[1] https://www.fredgao.com/p/deepseeks-liang-wenfeng-breaks-his

I have already begun winding down my spend on claude and OAI to make room for infra budget. Anecdotal, but I have no doubt a lot of others are doing the same, I very much agree the US players have major issues looming. What an exciting time to be alive!

Why is anything going to be catastrophic? Companies can go bankrupt without catastrophes for the rest of us. Happens all the time.

I seriously need to start considering the scenario in which this leads to next global financial crisis.

A lot of the performance of these open source models might come from distilling the closed frontier models. If those can't raise the funds anymore to train newer and better models then the whole improvement cycle might slow down.