Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, a Chinese AI model, performs comparably to frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI at a fraction of the cost, yet the industry hasn't responded with alarm. The model's efficiency—achieved through a 437x reduction in KV cache size—makes it viable for extended work sessions at minimal expense, fundamentally changing how developers approach AI tasks and potentially threatening the market dominance of Western AI labs.