Interesting thing is, DeepSeek’s parent company is actually a quantitative hedge fund, which might be one reason they can keep their prices so low.
DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
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Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#522China 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.
they are doing it through state investment vehicles - so it's in the same way US companies can (but won't)
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#523DeepSeek's KV cache is impressive and very cost-efficient for long-horizon tasks. I tested on VT Code with DeepSeek V4 Pro, and the cache-hit ratio is high. *I build a coding agent and have recently improved and hardened DeepSeek V4 integration. I registered the DeepSeek API key, topped up just 2 USD, and used just DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash with max thinking. So far the most visible improvement in both cost and context is the cache improvement; it's quite impressive with this announcement of a permanent price drop. (https://xcancel.com/vinhnx/status/2058748305350557932). Currently, my usage is still at $1.15 after 2 full weekends.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#524I’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine for a coding agent that can run arbitrary commands and read arbitrary files. Coding agent are much more useless if you have to sit there clicking approve on everything.
>I’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine...
So are the 96% of us humans that aren't USians.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#525I am more worried about accidental data leak (agent reading env file for example) with the Chinese hosted models compared to the US hosted models. Am I wrong to suspect that the Chinese government might be more likely to scan all chats and save useful information compared to the US government or company? I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me…
It's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all…
does your pricing take account of cached vs uncached token?
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran were fought to maintain US status?
All of them. Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, Iraq as a regional power flex and entrenchment. The first certainly preserved US status more than letting 9/11 go unanswered, the second to remove a hostile regional power and replace it with a friendlier government.
Now in Iran, the intention was to repeat Venezuela and effect regime change in a hostile country, bolstering America's military status.
Whether these wars have the effect they intend is beside the point; you're asking why they were fought, not whether they resulted in "Mission Accomplished".
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#527China 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…
Someone (can't remember who) said it best. US is the best at going from 0 to 1, China is the best at going from 1 to 100.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling them American owned models implies some sort of public ownership. These are models controlled by individuals whose benefits are absolutely not uniformly shared among the populace. I mean FFS a single hyper scale datacenter can provide free school lunches for a year. Something tells me the economic output of making sure children are fed is way higher than whether Zuckerberg can own another Hawaiian island by a…
Not really, it’s a pretty common way to address companies that are part of a bigger geopolitical story. The press will happily refer to Chinese models, European when talking about Mistral, Canadian with Cohere… etc. I’m an American person yet I’m not public property.
The implication is that American models winning would actually benefit Americans. That's not going to happen at all and talking about as if China "winning" would harm Americans is delusional cold war thinking at best.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#529I’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine for a coding agent that can run arbitrary commands and read arbitrary files. Coding agent are much more useless if you have to sit there clicking approve on everything.
>I’m worried about giving a foreign hosted service access to my machine... So are the 96% of us humans that aren't USians.
Does my concern somehow become less valid because I'm American? Everyone should be thinking carefully about which of their data is going where.
Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
#530China 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's not western democracies. It's western capitalism, and more poignantly, western billionaires. They're feeding the narratives. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg - they're the ones with bunkers and exit strategies. They are the lunatics buying seats at the political table and spreading FUD and meddling in our elections. They are the ones destroying the west's chances at a competitive future, instead: "capitalism".
They wanted the division, they're getting it and one side is raping and pillaging the masses.