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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

#561

Post by ninjagoo »

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.

> 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.

When GPT3.5 first came out it became clear that the Turing test was obviously deprecated in the age of LLMs and a product of its time - 1950 [0] - that had a limited understanding of Intelligence/Cognition. Today, as science discovers Whale language [1] and various degrees of animal cognition [2], the Turing test's limitations are even more stark.

> That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.

Perhaps it is time to retire it and its derivatives as a benchmark for artificial intelligence. Also, here in 2026, I don't believe any serious AI researchers rely on the Turing test anymore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test [1] https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-and-project-ceti-st... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition

PS - I think you're being unfairly downvoted

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#562

Post by windexh8er »

windexh8er wrote: post #531
palata wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here I think this is vastly underestimating what "catching up" means. All my life, people have been saying "China copies". Now they are objectively better at many things (including robotics), and... well it seems that we cannot "just copy". I saw western companies trying to "copy" superior Chinese technology, talking to brilliant engineers explaining how much they were l…

> The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess. And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development. Peter Zeihann really got it…

For those who don't like my comment I'd implore you to read [0].

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Apple-in-China/Patric...

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#563

Post by tancop »

radialstub wrote: post #436
palata wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most smartphones being sold are Android, though.

True, however apple makes the overwhelming majority of the profit in the smartphone market.

profit only matters for investors. if anything its a sign that apple is selling overpriced products and underpaying workers and you should avoid them.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#564

Post by perseusai »

I understand the hesitance to "give" your data to the PRC, but the cost difference is just overwhelming. Obviously the NSA or the like won't be pushing data up there, but for my little side projects or ad-block list automations, I could care less what happens to the info as long as I can use the tokens cheaply!

Am I insane?

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#565

Post by sfifs »

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.

Benchmarking the kind of cost savings I'm seeing moving from sonnet and gemini flash to local models, inference runs at least 90-95% gross margins. So they are probably still gross margin profitable.

BTW form my benchmarking, open weigh models are good enough for many agentic tasks starting with Qwen 3.5/6 family and Deepseek v4 family, so it's likely we'll see displacement of api usage from the premium priced providers. Yes trainingis expensive, this isn't training

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#567

Post by hedora »

radialstub wrote: post #405
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…

> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer. The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.

It's also one of the better performing. Is the value line (currently, the 17e, I guess) typically much more expensive than an android with comparable battery life, CPU performance, and OS support lifespan?

This year, things look pretty comparable according to this shopping guide. You can get slightly worse or last year's line for about $100 less, or something with comparable specs (some better, some worse) for about the same price:

https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/apple-iphone/4-android...

The thing with price/performance is that it doesn't dictate high end or low end. It just says you need to be competitive at some price points.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#568

Post by redanddead »

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.

Yeah. What we have here is simply poor governance.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#569

Post by redanddead »

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…

That's competing.

Re: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent

#570

Post by [deleted] »

windexh8er wrote: post #562
windexh8er wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess. And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development. Peter Zeihann really got it…

For those who don't like my comment I'd implore you to read [0]. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Apple-in-China/Patric...

[deleted]
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