Right—by “take it down” I just meant take down online access to their own running instance of it.

DeepSeek’s specific trained model is immaterial—they could take it down tomorrow and never provide access again, and the damage to OpenAI’s business would already be done.

DeepSeek’s model is just a proof-of-concept—the point is that any organization with a few million dollars and some (hopefully less-problematical) training data can now make their own model competitive with OpenAI’s.