A new post from @zartbotF. It’s an essay on DeepSeek open-sourcing its much-discussed “money-printing machine.” Zartbot argues that DeepSeek’s unique organizational setup is what enabled it to achieve an 80% gross margin. At other labs, for example, each team has its own KPIs, leaving little room for compromise. Even if an infrastructure engineer proposes compressing the KV cache further, they’ll inevitably face pushback from the algorithm team if it hurts model performance. But the most interesting point in the piece goes a step further: even if the algorithm team agrees to experiment with a new architecture that enables greater KV cache compression, the experiment may fail to produce a leading model. We saw this with V4. When DeepSeek V4 Pro came out and lagged behind GLM 5.3 and Kimi K3, everyone started saying DeepSeek was past its prime. But Zartbot argues that this was one step back to take two steps forward, and that the work played a major role in the subsequent evolution of 4.1 Flash with CSA2. A short but fascinating read. I’d encourage everyone to check it out.