memes

Eh, analogy will be imperfect due to nuance, but I'd say it is close.

The big deals are:

• DeepSeek isn't one of the "presumed winners" that investors had been betting on, and they caught up very quickly
• DeepSeek let people download the model, meaning others can host it free and clear. The investors largely assumed at least folks would all abide by the 'keep our model private if it is competitive and only allow access as a service offering', and this really fouls up assumptions that an AI provider would hold lock-in
• DeepSeek is pricing way way lower than OpenAI.
• Purportedly they didn't need to push their luck with just tons of H100 to get where they are. You are right that you still need pretty beefy to run it, but nVidia's stock was predicated on even bigger stakes. Reportedly an attempt to train a model by OpenAI involved $500 million, and a claim to train a "good enough" for less than $10 million dramatically reduces the value of nVidia. Note that why they are "way down" they still have almost a 3 trillion dollar market cap. That's still over 30 Intels or 12 AMDs. There's just some pessimism because OpenAI and Anthropic either directly or indirectly drove potentially a majority of nVidia revenue, and there's a lot more uncertainty about those companies now.

I also think this is on the back of a fairly long relatively stagnant run. After the folks saw the leap from GPT2 to ChatGPT they assumed a future of similar dramatic leaps, but have instead gotten increasingly modest refinements. So against a backdrop of a more "meh" sentiment over where they are going you have this thing to disturb some presumed fundamentals in the popular opinion.