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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

#491

Post by nl »

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…

> Huawei chips, new DDR5

The US is subsidizing in exactly the same way through the US Chip Act (as well as state level tax subsidies):

> The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

> Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs.

You can be sure the frontier labs all have similar approaches, but they just don't talk about them. That's why eg Google Flash (the old versions!) were do cheap.

I mean Google published MTP a month or so ago and it has sped up Qwen models by 1.7 times.

If that is what they still publish you get an idea of what they aren't.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#492

Post by dzonga »

toddmorey wrote: post #328
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.

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…

people might not wanna admit it because it feels politically incorrect - but that belief is massively due the idea of "western (white) supremacy".

cz if you're smart & pragmatic - then you will know innovation can come from anywhere - but western elites choose to continually bury their heads in the sand.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#493

Post by nl »

falcor84 wrote: post #410
api wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US committed massive IP theft in the 19th century when we industrialized.

I would appreciate some reading pointers about this.

> Samuel Slater ... known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution", a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson, and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the United Kingdom, he was called "Slater the Traitor" and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use.

> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He memorized as much as he could, and departed for New York City in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater#Early_life_and_e...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#494

Post by VulgarExigency »

elcritch wrote: post #484
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-me…

That doesn't sound right. Were you using the actual Deepseek provider? The one time I spent 3 dollars on Deepseek in a day, I had 615k output tokens, 96M cache hit input tokens, and 5M cache miss output tokens.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#495

Post by nl »

sandworm101 wrote: post #399
toddmorey wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As john oliver said on conan many years ago: "an inflatable barbecue!". China can certainly design an inflatable barbecue. China can certainly biuld an inlfatable barbecue. But will the chinese people ever want and buy an inflatable barbecue? ... never. That is why the US will remain the premier consumer economy.

The US is the richest consumer market in the world.

And yet BYD is likely to outsell Ford worldwide this year (despite being banned in the US)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#496

Post by azinman2 »

tomaskafka wrote: post #470
bwfan123 wrote: post #270

Kudos to the DeepSeek folks for making tokens not only affordable but also open source. This is a race to the bottom for token costs in a good way.

Open weights aren’t open source. Source is the learning data and algorithms, and that is closed.

And this is purely a way to undercut American models. If/once they’re ahead, it’ll stop being the case. Already qwen is doing that.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#497

Post by azinman2 »

alyxya wrote: post #11

Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.

And not letting you opt out of being their training data.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#498

Post by HerbManic »

toddmorey wrote: post #328
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.

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…

The one major area they are still behind in is CPU tech, but they are hungry and thus moving quick.

Looking at Loongsons processors for instance. About 15 years ago they coudl barely compete with a Pentium 2. Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. Further behind on some more specific work loads (SSL decoding for example) Not great but that is a decent jump. The jumps between generations are pretty decent.

LA446 was a decent enough processor core but had an awful memory controller that held it back as soon as it needed to reach outside of cache. As such it was SLOW.

But they learned the lesson and now the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.

They are launching the LA864 later this year and are touting some decent performance gains. That is just marketing so far but something to keep an eye on.

Considering that these chips are using their own ISA, own designs, domestic manufacturing and they aren't terrible is a big thing.

I suspect in the next 5 years they have the chance of completely closing the gap. But it can also go the other way that they end up stalling as smaller nodes get much more difficult to attain.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#499

Post by chuckadams »

skybrian wrote: post #397
FfejL wrote: post #278

Turing was half right. Pass his test and you haven't proven a machine can think — you've proven it can make us think it does. That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.

People have dumbed down the Turing Test. The original was a party game like Werewolf/Mafia. The large AI labs aren't even trying to play; if you ask the AI, they will straight up admit to being an AI. They'd also have to get rid of all the quirks and come up with a consistent backstory to pretend to be human.

I’d like to see how they do with the Voight-Kampff test.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#500

Post by airstrike »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #476
toddmorey wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, not my favorite narrative, but assume asymmetric application of intellectual property rights was a big factor. Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? It still feels like a short-sighted own goal. The US abandoned its ability to manufacture. Maybe dark factories and robotics can bring it back, but manufacturing supply chains are just so much more advance…

> Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? Yes, but "the US" is reductive. The exploitation wasn't done by the towns having their tentpole industries shipped overseas, it was done by the people shipping them overseas and pocketing the profit. US capital owners made a deal with the Chinese Communist Party that was good for both of them and bad for the US.

That's really well said.

The promise was always to get cheaper goods and services in the US, so long as the Chinese firms never competed. Guess what, they compete now.

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