Technology

Possibly, but in my view, this will simply accelerate our progress towards the "bust" part of the existing boom-bust cycle that we've come to expect with new technologies.

They show up, get overhyped, loads of money is invested, eventually the cost craters and the availability becomes widespread, suddenly it doesn't look new and shiny to investors since everyone can use it for extremely cheap, so the overvalued companies lose that valuation, the companies using it solely for pleasing investors drop it since it's no longer useful, and primarily just the implementations that actually improved the products stick around due to user pressure rather than investor pressure.

Obviously this isn't a perfect description of how everything in the work will always play out in every circumstance every time, but I hope it gets the general point across.

It's not about hampering proliferation, it's about breaking the hype bubble. Some of the western AI companies have been pitching to have hundreds of billions in federal dollars devoted to investing in new giant AI models and the gigawatts of power needed to run them. They've been pitching a Manhattan Project scale infrastructure build out to facilitate AI, all in the name of national security.

You can only justify that kind of federal intervention if it's clear there's no other way. And this story here shows that the existing AI models aren't operating anywhere near where they could be in terms of efficiency. Before we pour hundreds of billions into giant data center and energy generation, it would behoove us to first extract all the gains we can from increased model efficiency. The big players like OpenAI haven't even been pushing efficiency hard. They've just been vacuuming up ever greater amounts of money to solve the problem the big and stupid way - just build really huge data centers running big inefficient models.

What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of "exclusive" AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.

Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that's divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.

No but it would be nice if it would turn back in the tool it was. When it was called machine learning like it was for the last decade before the bubble started.

LLMs as tools,

Yes, in the same way that buying a CD from the store, ripping to your hard drive, and returning the CD is a tool.