WHY DEEPSEEK HAD TO BE OPEN-SOURCE (AND WHY IT WON'T DEFEAT OPENAI)

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

DeepSeek open-sourced its reasoning model R1, rivaling OpenAI's o1 in performance but at a fraction of the cost due to innovative training methods. This open-source approach, counterintuitive to standard business practices, was necessary for DeepSeek to overcome Western skepticism towards a Chinese AI company and gain market access. The increasing commoditization of LLMs that have similar performance across various models makes the higher cost of proprietary models like OpenAI's less appealing.