There are two things. First, deepseek v3 and r1 are both amazing models.
Second, the fact that deepseek was able to pull this off with such modest resources is an indication that there is no moat, and you might wake up tomorrow and find an even better model from a company you have never heard of.
Pull this off with such modest resources, including using ChatGPT itself for its RL inputs. It’s quite smart, and doesn’t disagree with your point that there is no moat per se, but without those frontier models and their outputs there is no V3, there is no R1.
Second, the fact that deepseek was able to pull this off with such modest resources is an indication that there is no moat, and you might wake up tomorrow and find an even better model from a company you have never heard of.