One base case for this, could be, as far as markets are concerned, the release of DeepSeek has shown the world that US Companies in the AI space have serious exposure to competition.
For example, previously it was believed you needed massive amounts of startup capital and large numbers of expensive engineers to get into this space. In other words you needed billions of dollars in expensive equipment and people to get “lift off” into the AI space. This limits the number of people who compete in this space (Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc).
Furthermore, it appeared you needed the latest and greatest chips, because training models is determined by the number of hours needed to train the model multiplied by the type of processor. Meaning, the faster the processor and the more of them, the faster the model is trained.
The release of this basically shows that in order to have a competitive AI start up you don’t need as much equipment as previously though, and also alot of the research has now been publicly release, cutting down on R&D costs. Furthermore, DeepSeek has shown that companies can develop this technology and overtake the market (#1 productivity app in the app store), with less than 6million in capital.
It possible that investors are now spooked because the ‘barrier to entry’ for companies to release the AI’s has been lowered. IE, you may not actually need a nuclear power plant to power your datacenter like people have been lead to believe. This means that globally there will now be many more companies entering this market, and challenging the US companies reign over the space. Which by the way, I’ve heard, the NASDAQ has gain some 17 trillion dollars in value since 2022, meaning there is a lot of “altitude” on that chart.
This may be good for tech in general because the cost of entry into these spaces comes down, allowing more people to enter the market with companies, and force efficiency and cost down, which is always a win for the consumer. Furthermore, if a comparable product comes out that is more cost efficient and this causes corrections in markets, and this is an opinion, is a good thing for free markets as that is the natural consequence of such developments.
This very much reminds me of Linux and Unix. When way back in the day you needed an expensive license for Unix and big, expensive mainframes. Also, you needed to buy a C compiler, which wasn’t cheap either, just to program (or learn to program for that matter). Basically, you needed to go to a major university (expensive) or work a at large company who could afford to buy the Unix Licenses and Compilers just to gain access to this technology.
When GNU came out and release it’s C compiler, and furthermore, Linux was release, anyone with a consumer grade computer can now run a “Unix-clone” and have access to a C compiler.
If it wasn’t for this development, I wouldn’t be a software engineer today because I learned to program with the GCC and Ubuntu Linux and didn’t go to a university for this field. I was able to download GCC/Ubuntu and read books and online resources to teach myself how to do this, and for that I am very grateful.
Perhaps now we can all run our own offline AIs and learn how to train them without working for big tech…