If what you say is true, isn't what one of the big contribution of Deepseek is that they wrote some custom lower level GPU cluster to GPU cluster communication protocol instead using of the nvidia soft ecosystem? And that is open sourced?

Well, they wrote it _for_ Nvidia stuff, though; if anything that was a contribution to the Nvidia ecosystem! Though it does show a willingness to go outside the _established_ Nvidia ecosystem.

I'm always a little surprised that Nvidia is _so_ highly valued, because it seems inevitable to me that there is a tipping point where big companies will either make their own chips (see Google) or take the hit and build their own giant clusters of AMD or Huawei or whoever chips, and that knowledge will leak out, and ultimately there will be alternatives.

Nvidia to me feels a bit like dot-com era Sun. For a while, if you wanted to do internet stuff, you pretty much _had_ to buy Sun servers; the whole ecosystem was kinda built around Sun. Sun's hardware was expensive, but you could just order a bunch of it, shove it in racks, and it worked and came with good tooling. Admins knew how to run large installations of Sun machines. You could in theory use cheaper x86 machines running Linux or BSD, but no-one really knew how to do that at scale. And then, as the internet companies got big, they started doing their own thing (usually Linux-based), building up administration tooling and expertise, and by the early noughties Linux/Apache was the default and Sun was increasingly irrelevant.