That's just it: they have more compute. They have a "do more with more" lever in addition to a "do slightly less with much less" lever. DeepSeek can't win with the first lever, so they have committed everything to the second, while within the frontier labs the two levers fight for attention and frankly the first is clearly the favored child. I'm not accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of being slouches, but I am not sure that more resources + divided goals > singleminded pursuit of a singular goal.