DeepSeek Deep Sixes the Silicon Valley Monopolies
For years, Silicon Valley’s ethos has been anti-competition. Rather than innovate, companies acquired. The result is crap we don’t like, companies that are bullies & growing unemployment in tech.
Silicon Valley has spent the last decade gorging itself on monopolistic consolidation, strangling competition, and ultimately ensuring its own stagnation. Lina Khan, chair of the FTC under President Biden, warned us all: protecting tech monopolies doesn’t just hurt consumers and workers—it hurts the monopolies themselves. DeepSeek just proved her right.
For years, Silicon Valley’s ethos has been anti-competition. Rather than innovate, companies acquired. Rather than build, they bought. And rather than foster a healthy, competitive marketplace, they disgorged talent and resources under the illusion that their dominance was unshakable. The result? They grew bloated, slow, and unable to adapt.
Example Adobe: In 2023, the EU stopped them from acquiring Figma using their anti monopoly laws. Suddenly they were forced to reckon with a truth they’ve been avoiding for years: they can’t just buy their way to success anymore. And guess what? They don’t seem to know how to build. (What designer reading this really likes Photoshop and Illustrator? Who would rather find something better and cheaper to use?)
The same goes for Google, Meta, Amazon, and every other tech giant that spent the last decade optimizing for monopoly instead of innovation. The result is crap we don’t like, companies that are bullies, and growing unemployment in the tech sector.
Look no further than OpenAI’s $500 billion bet on AI computing power—an arms race investment that now looks increasingly out of touch. Instead of making AI accessible and fostering innovation, they closed the garden gate, kicked out their oversight committees, and bet everything on a few deep-pocketed customers, leaving themselves vulnerable to more efficient competitors like DeepSeek.
I’m reminded of a classic Steve Martin bit where he proclaims that instead of selling thousands of reasonably priced tickets for his concert, he’ll sell just one ticket for an astronomical sum—solving his revenue problem in the most absurd way possible.
Enter the Jevons Paradox
Fortunately, monopolizing the world isn’t as easy as these tech giants thought. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has just delivered a breakthrough in model efficiency that exposes just how vulnerable these U.S. tech behemoths have become. You might have heard the collective gasp last week when $1 trillion in market value was wiped out across U.S. exchanges. When you spend a decade focused on protecting your monopoly instead of innovating, you end up a sitting duck.
The upside (for the rest of us)? DeepSeek has just made AI training radically more efficient. That means we’re about to see an explosion of competition—not just from China but from all the independent engineers and startups that Silicon Valley thought they had under their thumb. And, the cheaper AI becomes to train, the more companies and industries will integrate AI into their workflows, fueling demand for better products and services.
In one swell foop, DeepSeek deep sixed the Silicon Valley monopolies. They’re going to have to sell more tickets, and at a lower price. And that means back to the white board to…oh I don’t know, innovate?
Oh look, that’s how trust busting works.
Oops, I guess we do need those tech folk
Here’s the real kicker: for years, tech giants have been laying off talent en masse—ostensibly to appease Wall Street but in reality, because they’ve forgotten how to manage growth without acquisition.
These are some of the best engineers, researchers, and developers in the world, and many of them now find themselves looking elsewhere for opportunities. If the U.S. won’t support innovation and competition, it’s not hard to see where they’ll go.
Silicon Valley has had a long run of enshittification—stripping products down to maximize profits while assuming customers would have no choice but to stay. But DeepSeek just signaled a shift.
Competition is back, baby.
Innovation is back.
And if Silicon Valley wants to survive, it has to remember how to do the thing it was once known for: making great products. If not? Let’s grab some popcorn and watch the worm turn.