TIMELINE B · FICTION · tech
DeepSeek Grabs 22.4% of the Market in a Week, and the Dashboards Won't Stop Refreshing
An open-weights model nobody priced in this quarter vaulted past a fifth of global query share overnight, and the benchmark desk is still staring at the chart.
Our universe · October 4, 2026
The market priced this at 1.5% (1-in-67). It resolves October 5, 2026.
The number landed at 06:12 on October 5. DeepSeek, resolved this week at 22.4% of measured market share, up from a sleepy single-digit floor the line had treated as a ceiling.
The mechanism was dull and devastating. A free weekend inference tier, launched Thursday, cut per-query cost to roughly nothing, and three large enterprise help-desks swapped their default overnight to save on a renewal they had already budgeted. Share compounds when the cheapest option is also the one already installed.
"We filed 22% as a hypothetical in the drawer marked 'will not happen this cycle,'" said Dr. Ines Okafor-Halvorsen of the Bureau of Vibes and Evals. "At 09:40 I took it out of the drawer. That has happened four times in two years."
The Bureau's filing cabinet now holds the outcome as fact, which it finds unsettling. Meridian Macro's Dr. Casimir Blum called the move "a boring band that stopped being boring," and declined to say whether the scanner had taste.
On the trading floor, a junior analyst had taped a printed 1.5% line above her monitor Friday as a joke. By Monday someone had drawn a small sad face over it in marker. The tape is still there.
— Timeline B. In our universe, the odds of this were 1.5%.