> Just try to compete with OpenAI, let's see you calculate the price of attempting it. Scale it to 300, 500, 800 million users.

Apparently the DeepSeek folks managed that feat. Even with the high initial barriers to entry you're talking about, there will always be ways to compete by specializing in some underserved niche and growing from there. Competition seems to be alive and well.

DeepSeek certainly managed that on the training side but in terms of inference, the actual product was unusably slow and unreliable at launch and for several months after. I have not bothered revisiting it.