I'm sure the frontier labs figured out very clever ways to leverage user input and actions as data for training and signals for RL. DeepSeek wants in on the game.
DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
401–410 of 586 posts
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#402China 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.
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.” Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here. But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all…
>Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.
There is (was): attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society. Trump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#403It’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.
You can specify the provider on Openrouter to only use Deepseek and get the cheaper pricing.
But worse data retention and training policy. It’s a balance.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#404China 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 compan…
not just renewables, also massive nuclear capacity and huge modern coal plants. They can really crank up capacity if they want to. How long will it take to get a new nuclear power plant operational in the US?
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#405China 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 compan…
> 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.
The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#406China 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 believe you are right. These models are at worst a 6 month lag to the costly frontier models, but the ability to scale energy production is years ahead of where the US is. That advantage is often under appreciated Their cost of energy is what matters vs the US as much as speed buildout.
I'm still not entirely clear on the problem capability matching. E.g. it seems like Kimi K2.6 with good context would already be able to solve a huge chunk of problems. What share of prompts require frontier models?
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#407I'm sure the frontier labs figured out very clever ways to leverage user input and actions as data for training and signals for RL. DeepSeek wants in on the game.
Agreed. The amount of effectively annotated (possibly very sensitive) data that users are voluntarily shoving across the line seems worth losing some money over. I imagine that data is also not exactly safe from the Chinese government.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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...
Yea, I really don't see how much longer the US economy can hold on. The baby boomers are working overtime to rob multiple future generations of opportunity to feed their profits now. The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
> The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
Sounds like they're just catching up to what Democrats always used to say whenever a Democrat was in the White House and some Republican would complain about the national debt. "A government isn't a household, debt doesn't work the same way, you don't get it."
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cache read for dp4-flash is $0.0028 /M tokens, which is more than 10 times cheaper (and also much cheaper for cache miss and output tokens). Have not actually compared it to other models, but I would not consider it in the same price range.
this price only available if you ok to send your data to Beijing Volcano Engine Technology Co. for the rest open router vendors it is not the same.
Not sure why you are downvoted, this is essentially correct (assuming Volcano Engine tech refers to Deepseek as provider).
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be more far to say: they needed the US until they caught up. The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here. Though theft might be too strong since a lot of companies knew what they were getting in to
The US committed massive IP theft in the 19th century when we industrialized.
I would appreciate some reading pointers about this.