I was reading someone's thread on X where he was doing a deep dive into why DeekSeek R1 went viral and I think he had a good point. Besides the technical merits of the model he noticed (and I concur) that there is significant amount of schadenfreude in seeing OpenAI get what's coming. If you just do a search on DeepSeek on youtube you can see all the videos taking that schadenfreude tone talking about how it dropped a bomb on the sharemarket and is smashing the AI bro oligarch. The guy's theory is there is nascent class conscious emerging in the US which understand the big tech oligarchs are in alignment with the government (demonstrated all the more clearly during Trump's inauguration and Stargate) intent on creating a techno-feudal society straight out of Cyberpunk 2077. DeepSeek due to its open source nature just happens to fit the Robin Hood image well, hence why ordinary people identify with it much more than the big AIs. The fact that this narrative slots right in with the "oligarch intend to replace us with H1B Indians" and XHS refugees thinking China is a socialist worker utopia are also extra bonus.
Thus he points out any argument based on DeepSeek "stealing" from OpenAI in distilling their model won't catch on with the common man and will be ridiculed instead, since stealing from the rich and giving it to the poor is precisely what Robin Hood is meant to do.
