Whoever wrote this article didn’t even bother to do the most basic of research.

DeepSeek fully admitted they started with ChatGPT outputs to train its model. And then they released it as an open-source model, so that everybody else can “steal” their work. On the image/video front, the general public has created every possible variation on top of every model you can think of. On top of that, any model that has ever been released with full weights has been spun into whatever variation or VRAM size you want.

The ugly truth that the American companies want to hide is the fact that they are spending trillions of dollars on an oligopoly that they can’t keep long-term. They hope that they can just keep spending more money to add more billions of parameters to their models, and keep technologically competitive with the secondary open-source models. But, they’ve already ran into diminishing returns over a year ago, and the global compute sector physically cannot keep up with demand for another cycle of even more diminishing returns.

The other factor is that realistic miniaturization of models is already here. Some of the smaller sizes aren’t as effective as the 250GB models they use on cloud-based services, but you can still do a lot with a 16GB or 24GB video card, using models of those sizes. Optimization and LLM quantization is getting better and better each year. The AI bubble burst is going to force a cascade shift into a new era of localization. Everybody is sick to fucking death of renting and subscribing to everything. Us pirates already do so on the media front, and soon localization of LLMs is going to become way more popular.

The question isn’t “Can people steal the tech?”. It’s “how long will people notice that it’s already happening?”