
The most interesting part of the DeepSeek R1 launch isn't the math; it's the panic in Silicon Valley. A Chinese lab just released a model that matches OpenAI's best reasoning for a fraction of the training cost. This destroys the 'moat' that big US tech companies thought they had. If a free model is this good in 2026, why would anyone pay for ChatGPT Plus? The subscription model for AI might be dead before it even fully started.

