Compute, not algorithms or talent, decides who can compete at the frontier.

6 source(s) assert this claim, 1 deny it.

Who asserts it

So the difference between us and the US, I believe, is a difference in resources. We might believe that all the differences we see—including the talent difference, the model capability difference, the application difference—can all be considered as due to the difference in compute resources.

DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Breaks His Silence — 2026-07-23

Talent isn’t the bottleneck—resources are the biggest bottleneck. Resources first affect talent cultivation, because with little compute, our opportunities to run experiments are relatively few, so our talent overall has a gap with the US. The talent gap is essentially also because of the compute gap.

DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Breaks His Silence — 2026-07-23

Compute resources—on one hand, cards simply can’t be bought domestically; on the other hand, our capital investment is less than the US. We’re much less at the capital investment level, and talent-based salaries account for a very low proportion within this. You see them offering salaries of a hundred million dollars, but calculating it, talent salaries still account for very little—the bulk is still compute.

DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Breaks His Silence — 2026-07-23

Who denies it

The idea that whoever builds the fastest railcar - and not the most railroads - would attain pole position in a nü-industrial revolution, has always been absurd to me.[10] But I understand this can be difficult to grok if one reasons from theory-first rather than first-principles. Especially when the local echo chamber affirms said theories must be true by some unmeasurable intrinsic quality, or by recursively referring to other, more "authoritative" theories, for support. [Figure: chart/image — see original article]