Later entrants build on frontier research at tiny fraction of cost.
Foundation models have a first-mover disadvantage because AI models can train other AI models. Stanford’s Alpaca model was fine-tuned for less than $100, utilizing existing GPT-3 that had cost over $4.6 million. That’s 46,000 times cheaper. Research into frontier models presents an economic disadvantage. If we apply the same 18x discount to Trump’s Stargate $500 billion announcement, someone could do the same value creation with just a $27 billion investment. Models are difficult to protect from other companies or countries.
— DeepSeek - New Economic Rules And Regulatory Challenge · Forbes