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DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

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Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#341

Post by syntaxing »

chrisweekly wrote: post #324
syntaxing wrote: post #311

It’s wild. Regardless of Deepseek direct pricing, on Openrouter itself, the pricing for Pro is comparable to Haiku. Flash is even cheaper. You get Opus 4.5 and better than Sonnet 4.6 performance.

Could you please clarify exactly what you mean?

If you look at openrouter for Deepseek model providers that does not use your data to train, it’s still significantly cheaper than Anthropic pricing. The Pro and Flash performs closely to Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.6 respectively (though no vision capability which is a fair thing another user called out). The pricing of Pro is close to Haiku. The pricing of Flash is 10X cheaper. To put into perspective, you can have Sonnet 4.6 capabilities at 10X cheaper than Haiku even without “Chinese government subsidies”.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#342

Post by margalabargala »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #334
Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. Funny that you talk about being afraid of your own shadow. I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.

> Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you.

The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels.

We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for just not cancelling wind and solar projects, and generally updating the grid infrastructure.

A rising tide lifts all boats. If the subsidies go to common infrastructure, that's good for everyone. There's no need to complain about a road being paved because it will benefit FedEx in addition to everyone else.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#343

Post by bryanlarsen »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #334
Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. Funny that you talk about being afraid of your own shadow. I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.

Power is foundational to pretty much everything. Cheap power is going to give China a massive advantage in everything; AI is just incidental.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#344

Post by lenerdenator »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Well, yeah. This is a technology that has the potential to make large chunks of the population unemployed.

Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#345

Post by 999900000999 »

rvz wrote: post #275

While Anthropic, OpenAI and Google continue to charge an expensive amount of $$$ for in/output per million tokens and Microsoft complaining that AI costs more than hiring humans [0] and changes their pricing, it appears that Jevons paradox applies only to Deepseek. This is why companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of "safety" when what Deepseek is doing is racing ever…

I can very easily imagine protectionism coming into play.

Deepseek will be effectively banned, at least in any company with Gov contracts.

Americans get to pay 4x as much for EVs, and 6x as much for LLM tokens.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#346

Post by hedora »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

I'm not sure how much of it is subsidies. If the open weight models are anything to judge by, China is taking price performance seriously, and the US model vendors are looking for performance at any cost. Like any other Pareto optimization, we end up paying 10x more for the last few percent improvement on benchmark scores.

Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.

Also, of course, China's way ahead of the US on things like renewables, batteries, and electrification of their economy. All of that feeds into cheaper power to run the models, but I suspect it's a second order effect vs. "improve the software".

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#347

Post by onionisafruit »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #337
Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

> China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't They're subsidizing this in many ways - Huawei chips, new DDR5 memory fabs, etc. Ultimately, DeepSeek's architecture is significantly more cost effective than anything from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcom…

What’s the TLA architecture? I haven’t read about that.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#348

Post by itishappy »

estearum wrote: post #329
itishappy wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which particular world views and leanings? Mine are likely quite different than yours. How does this site feel about "Woke AI" for instance? Remember, no neutrality please. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...

Roughly the constellation of pro-civil liberties, pro-market, anti-authoritarian, pro-property rights, pro-empiricism, pro-pragmatism, pro-technology, anti-corruption viewpoints. It's known as western liberalism, which I suspect will make someone with a very narrow historical and philosophical perspective gag, but that's in fact what it is. Even the most wannabe fascists among us enjoy (as in benefit from and actuall…

> Roughly the constellation of pro-civil liberties, pro-market, anti-authoritarian, pro-property rights, pro-empiricism, pro-pragmatism, pro-technology viewpoints.

Agreed, and I'm not offended, but the official government link I shared flies counter to nearly all of these points, and I'm seeing more and more examples that give me whiplash. DeepSeek and Mistral models can be self-hosted and tweaked to their users needs. Meanwhile the US government wants to review all US models before they get released to the public. China already does this, but I kinda hoped we were different. I have a feeling that the US is less exceptional that we like to think. Narcissism of small differences.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#349

Post by readthenotes1 »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #306

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

"China is building for the future, "

Meanwhile, the USA is paying for its past excesses, with interest on its debt being the number two most expensive line item in the budget.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#350

Post by Lwerewolf »

revolvingthrow wrote: post #288

Amusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.

Given that you can run quantized flash on 128g ram, and there's a heavy focus around it (DS4)... I'd say that it's pretty feasible for a decent amount of devs. Never thought I'd buy an MBP but here we are.

n.b. I can't use nonlocal models for a big chunk of my work, so there's that as well.

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