Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper). Only in the world where the incumbents don't react. Eg if they saw lots of users moving away, they'd drop prices or do something else.
1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead. btw I've had a ton of fun with the new deepseek today, I was waiting for my OpenAI 5h limit reset and decided to give it some problems for fun, got pretty great results. Tried some harder problems and still got great results. I don't expect it to be Sol class or anything but I…
Losing most of your customers tends to sharpen the mind a bit. They could eg stop pushing out the absolute frontier for a while and focus on making what they have run cheaper. Or they go and do more lobbying against China. Or a million other little things that take more than 30 seconds to come up with when writing a HN comment, but less than a week for someone who's smart and paid to do this for a living.