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.
DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
311–320 of 586 posts
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#312China 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.
What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?
I have not fully seen or appreciated most of the negativity. Obviously there are exceptions to that but in my eyes it has largely exposed how vulnerable the west is due to poor infrastructure constructs and a lack of building out generation and transmission.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#313China 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.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#314China 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.
What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?
Yes, I want cheap clean power.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#315China 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.
What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?
Nope.
We have exported production to China in many things, we forget that we had dark satanic mills of our own.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#316China 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.
That is the talking point of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC:
https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
"Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China."
In reality Xi has warned of AI bubbles. If China was really pushing it they'd be equal or ahead because so many researchers are Chinese anyway. Instead, China is building real stuff instead of focusing on hot air like a16z ("crypto", "AI", you name it). Maybe China should sponsor that PAC to accelerate the demise of the West.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#317I'm quite sure (and you could find it somewhere of course) that the Chinese models would've been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views. Even so, at what point is even the quality risk (assuming your use case won't be affected by those adjustments) and any potential privacy concerns outweighed by the fact that it's literally an order of magnitude (and sometimes multiple, for output tokens etc!) cheaper than…
At this point I don’t see the difference between the U.S. or China what it comes to privacy concerns anymore. US might be even worse. Run locally if you want privacy. At least Chinese make it possible.
If you want the masses to run locally, try squeezing the memory requirements down even more. 8GB of system RAM is not uncommon IRL, I suspect.
Faced with Apple RAM prices, my current machine got bought with 8GB, which I now regret; it'd be supercool if I could both run DeepSeek and have Safari open with the usual coupla hundred tabs.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#318[flagged]
You are likely being downvoted for pretending like this is a China specific problem. The only difference in the US is the government and businesses not admitting to it.
Plus I think its funny you complain about China stealing things when all the big AI models are based on massive troves of stolen information and IP.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm quite sure that the American models have been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views
Right, but they're ones that are more concordant with the leanings and world views of the people and businesses that frequent this forum. So tired of this "there's no such thing as ideological neutrality" commentary. We get it. Move on. Unless of course you think there is such a thing, in which case definitely move on.
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...
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point I don’t see the difference between the U.S. or China what it comes to privacy concerns anymore. US might be even worse. Run locally if you want privacy. At least Chinese make it possible.
That’s where this is going. I think we’re one year away from being able to use Opus 4.6 levels of coding performance on a 3k laptop. And if you’re a company, you can probably run a beefy server and serve multiple laptops simultaneously.
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