Unpopular Opinion: Deepseek has rat-effed OpenAI's 2025 business model and they know it

All of this is just speculation/opinion from some random Internet guy who enjoys business case studies...but...

The release of Deepseek is a bigger deal than I think most people realize. Pardon me while I get a bit political, too.

By the end of 2024, OpenAI had it all figured out, all the chess pieces were where they needed to be. They had o1, with near unlimited use of it being the primary draw of their $200 tier, which the well-off and businesses were probably going to be the primary users of, they had the popular plus tier for consumers.

Consumers didnt quite care for having sporadic daily access to GPT-4o and limited weekly access to o1, but those who were fans of ChatGPT and only CGPT were content...OpenAIs product was still the best game in town, besides their access being relatively limited; even API users had to a whopping $15 per million tokens, which ain't much at all.

o3, the next game-changer, would be yet another selling point for Pro, with likely and even higher per million token cost than o1...which people with means would probably have been more than willing to pay.

And of course, OpenAI had to know that the incoming U.S. president would become their latest, greatest patron.

OpenAI was in a position for relative market leadership for Q1, especially after the release of o3, and beyond.

And then came DeepSeek R1.

Ever seen that Simpsons episode where Moe makes a super famous drink called the Flaming Moe, then Homer gets deranged and tells everyone the secret to making it? This is somewhat like that.

They didn't just make o1 free; they open-sourced it to the point that no one who was paying $200 for o1 primarily is going to do that anymore; anyone who can afford the $200 per month or $15 per million tokens probably has the ability to buy their own shit-hot PC rig and run R1 locally at least at 70B.

Worse than that, DeepSeek might have proved that even after o3 is released, they can probably come out with their own R3 and make it free/open source it.

Since DeepSeek is Chinese-made, OpenAI cannot use its now considerable political influence to undermine DeepSeek (unless there's a Tik-Tok kind of situation).

If OpenAI's business plan was to capitalize on their tech edge through what some consider to be proce-gouging, that plan may already be a failure.

Maybe that's the case, as 2025 is just beginning. But it'll be interesting to see where it all goes.

Edit: Yes, I know Homer made the drink first; I suggested as much when I said he revealed its secret. I'm not trying to summarize the whole goddamn episode though. I hates me a smartass(es).

TLDR: The subject line.