>frontier models are more capable than the latest from DeepSeek. But is the capability difference enough to justify a 30x price difference?
The contradiction here is that without frontier models, there'd be no foundation for models like DeepSeek to reference and catch up to. Is there an economic model that captures this kind of dynamic?
Free market competition? This is a pretty classic pattern. Leaders capture market with quality but run into trouble scaling, followers compete on price and availability. Given time, leaders eventually run out of upgrade runway and find themselves swallowed up by followers. Or alternatively, leaders think their lead is inevitable and miss a sea change or iterative upgrade path. Think IBM PCs before Compaq and other cheap clones ate their lunch.
I guess they’d be hoping for very protective IP laws in that case.
Hold on mate, do you realize that a significant number of recent major advances in AI came from deepseek?