DeepSeek and shallow moats

Ben Swift

I wrote a piece for THE Campus about what DeepSeek R1 means for universities signing big-ticket AI deals. The sector has form for betting on technological moats that turn out to be mirages—we did it with MOOC platforms a decade ago—and the moats around frontier AI look shallower than the contracts assume.

Read it at Times Higher Education.

Cite this post

@online{swift2025deepseekAndShallowMoats,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {DeepSeek and shallow moats},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2025/02/18/deepseek-and-shallow-moats/},
  year = {2025},
  month = {02},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2025-02-18-deepseek-and-shallow-moats},
}