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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

#481

Post by epolanski »

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

Yes, countries where compromise is not required, where social, capital and human costs are non-factors and where regulations are bendable at will by who's in power can be more effective at achieving some goals.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#482

Post by lobocinza »

coliveira wrote: post #379
jm_l wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All public infrastructure benefits the public but the role of our governance is to correctly prioritize. $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.

No, the money is not coming from a fixed box. When the US wants to do something (typically starting a new war), they never ask where the money is coming from. This tells you everything about how the decisions are made, if it is a priority for them, they will spend the money first and ask questions later. If green infrastructure was a real priority they would invest the money and later find ways to pay for it.

But those wars are typically fought to maintain the US status, to preserve its ability to debase the national currency effectively siphoning wealth from the world economy. Self-preservations comes first. I'm just describing the system.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#483

Post by giobox »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #308
nicce wrote: post #289

Earlier 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.

I sometimes feel like the whole industry forgot the entire mainframe vs the desktop battle that birthed the PC industry when we discuss AI.

Moore's law, even if it has had the occasional slow down or hiccup, always wins over time. 128gb or more of local memory will likely be in many cellphones within a decade.

The first iPhone had only 128mb of RAM. Today I can buy one with 12gb - in just under 20 years we got a ~9275% increase in RAM. I can get 24GB in flagship Android handsets.

Even if we only get 3000% storage space growth in the next 10 years, that still grants us all an iPhone with ~370gb of RAM. Gosh knows what high end desktops and laptops will be packing...

Of course a lot of AI processing is going to push out to the edge.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#484

Post by elcritch »

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.

Yesterday I did some testing on the cost to solve the same simple problem on openrouter with different models using cline. Simple problem but it had a few nuances to solve it properly and so required reasoning.

After reading comments like this I was expecting (hoping?) that DeepSeek or similar would be cheaper.

However I was surprised that DeepSeek v4 cost about 5.5x GPT-5.4 to solve the problem.

- Deepseek-v4-pro-medium cost $2.47 - GPT-5.4-medium cost $0.45 - GPT-5.5-low was $0.86

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#485

Post by dietr1ch »

rootusrootus wrote: post #478
dietr1ch wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people Apple's main selling point is about showing off the cute devices and battery life, but that's not going to play a role when users are free to choose the tool that will call the models.

I’ve never seen anyone show off an iPhone. What a weird take.

I was talking more about laptops, but haven't you seen people sms bubble colour-shaming?

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#486

Post by aftbit »

layoric wrote: post #464
hedora wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They also banned crypto mining which previously was using the free to cheap electricity, so if AI data centres are using those now under utilised supply, very possible subsidies are very low.

And yet despite the ban, China's contributions to Bitcoin mining remain very large.

https://cryptonews.com/news/china-doubles-down-on-crypto-ban...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#487

Post by bdangubic »

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.

yup - good read: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-efficiency-moat-why-c...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#488

Post by falcor84 »

imjonse wrote: post #416
falcor84 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would appreciate some reading pointers about this.

'usa ip theft 19th century' in your fav search engine

Well, I did, and to save others the time, the most relevant resource I found appears to be the book "Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America” (2013) by Peter Andreas

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#489

Post by throawayonthe »

raincole wrote: post #193
raincole wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek is very likely selling tokens at a loss. There're many cloud providers that provide you with DeepSeek V4 Pro via API, and those services at least twice as expensive as DeepSeek itself.

^Sorry for this understatement. DeepSeek is actually selling tokens at a far cheaper price than my previous comment implied. DeepSeek V4 Pro price on OpenRouter: deepseek: $0.435 / $0.87 baidu/fp8: $1.521 / $3.042 novita/fp8: $1.64 / $3.38 Yup. DeepSeek either has next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to, or they're selling at a loss.

> next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to

not necessarily 'next-gen', but they've optimized for the Huawei Ascend 950 right? not a lot of those outside china at least

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#490

Post by quantum_state »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #349
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...

In the last 40 years, China has been building while the US has been wasting money and lives fighting wars. Can we learn to really put America first for once?
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