Item — HN Reader

In the car business there is only one or two car models that are the best ideal choice, but many subpar companies and models, are still selling for many reasons.

It shows DeepSeek is competitive, if not better sometimes, than GPT 5.5. Also shows there is no moat. As such it is a highly significant signal.

1 comments

I agree that there may be a lot of variation between models that leads to different use cases, at least today. But I’m not sure the car analogy works.

An X5 is not simply “inferior” to a CR-V, or vice versa. A Camry is not “inferior” to an F-150, or vice versa. They are optimized for different buyers, budgets, constraints, and use cases.

That may actually be the better analogy for AI models: there probably is not one universal “best” model. There are models that are better or worse for particular tasks, price points, latency requirements, deployment constraints, privacy needs, etc.

It's worse than that. It's more like being able to buy an X5 for $5 and produce them for $1000, skipping everything that made making an X5 hard.