Good Enough, Fifty Times Cheaper: The Theorem Crushing American AI
US export controls were meant to strangle Chinese AI; instead they taught it frugality, and frugality became its pricing weapon. DeepSeek, Qwen, and the swarm of open-weight models now deliver good enough at a fraction of the Western price, which is all it takes to tip the overwhelming majority of use cases. But the market hasn’t tipped where people think: the absolute frontier stays American, and the real moat, distribution, already has the hyperscalers reselling the Chinese commodity on their own compute. For Europe, defaulting to the Hangzhou API means swapping one suzerain for another, when the only real exit, self-hosting open weights, is no free lunch. What remains to be seen is whether the continent will build the conditions, regulatory and industrial, that make this reflex something more than the gesture of an enlightened minority.