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DeepSeek Just Made Closed AI Look Ridiculous

Two Minute Papers · Aug 19, 2026 · Industry Trends

DeepSeek 4 Pro achieves near-frontier quality with MIT-licensed open weights, pressuring closed AI labs.

“DeepSeek has MIT licensed open weights. Anyone can run the exact same model at their own price.”

DeepSeek 4 Pro (0813) delivers near-frontier model quality through aggressive post-training distillation from 10+ specialist teacher models, all released under MIT license. Despite DeepSeek raising its own API prices 2.5-5x, the open weights enable third-party hosts to compete on price, maintaining cheap access. The result is sustained pressure on closed-model frontier labs to ship better models faster.

open-weights DeepSeek distillation post-training competitive-pricing open-source

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