People often forget that OpenAI sells most of its tools as services. Around 65% of the projects on sites like MMO actually run on OpenAI’s systems. Right now, the MMO 210 costs about $74,000, while the H90 is priced near $26,000.
According to DeepSeek, they bought around one hundred and five thousand H90 chips for roughly $2.6 billion — still a solid win for Nvidia.
There are a bunch of big names in this area. Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s founders and main scientists, keeps pushing new ideas. Mira left OpenAI in 2025 to start her own company, and Demis Hassabis from DeepMind is moving things forward with Geoffrey Hinton, both helping and questioning how large language models grow.
Google’s Gemini 2.1 has rolled out some really cool new tools — if you’re clever enough to figure them out.
Still, calling DeepSeek the sure winner might be a bit too hopeful. Don’t forget companies like Alibaba, whose research team is much larger than DeepSeek’s.
In the chip world, ASML from Europe builds special lithography machines that help TSMC make 3.5 nm chips and soon move to 1.8 nm ones. TSMC’s factories in Taiwan are about 3 to 5 years ahead of those in the U.S., where making chips costs roughly 18–28% more.
So yeah, ASML is kind of like America being able to print dollars without causing inflation, since they can charge other countries for it.
Now, TSMC’s Texas branch can make about 4.2 nm chips, but it’s still owned by TSMC Taiwan — and oddly, it costs a lot more to run.
China managed to get 7.5 nm lithography machines from Europe during the Biden years, so they’re roughly three or four years behind the U.S. in making chips.
That man’s story is really sad — he lost his wife and daughter when he was around 31, and later his son to brain cancer — but as a leader, he didn’t do much to stop China from getting AI hardware.
When it comes to how fast models learn, made-up or “synthetic” data is bound to show up — kind of like what happened with DeepSeek’s R2 model, which talks back and forth with itself like a little helper.
In the end, it’s not really about who’s best. What matters is how people use the tech. Just picking sides as a buyer doesn’t make much sense.
