The lower prices could be aimed at undercutting the competition.
Mobster voice: Sure would be a pity if the monetization potential of those 2 huge IPOs (3 if you count SpaceX with xAI deadweight rolled in) went boom when that’s all that’s holding your economy out of recession (depression depending on how they cook the books).
The way SpaceX IPO got crammed into index, it’s invulnerable to anything but an immediate incarceration of everybody involved.
Index funds will be required to buy the stocks at a listing price before market can decide how much they are worth exactly.
Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.
Yep this will be the fourth or fifth record breaking upward transfers of wealth I’ve lived through. I really don’t want to live through another.
At this point many people won’t. Hard to squeeze blood out of a dried, overworked, malnutritioned poisoned and diseased husk of a laid off worker.
Can’t wait until enough people are unemployed that nothing is stopping them from marching in the streets.
Remember what happened during covid layoffs? People brought tents to the protests and camped out for months…
Wait, I don’t remember that happening during Covid. I remember some years before, that happened as part of the 99% anti Wall Street protests… which did nothing.
Well, they leaked the Panama papers, which showed exactly how and how much they are stealing/defrauding… which did nothing.
You’ve already forgotten about the BLM protests?
Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.
Not at all wrong, but there’s only so much blood parasites can suck before the host dies (and with luck kills the parasites, and / or sends a strong signal to everybody else to get their infestations eradicated, or at the very least under control), and that host is already hurting bad.
Perhaps I’m being optimistic, but a collapse of the likely magnitude could be that straw, or maybe it’ll just be the back of US influence that breaks.
I think I’m following what you’re saying but I haven’t read anything about this. Where can I read more?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-X6YzlY_8tM presents a good summary.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI is a longer analysis coming at it from a slightly different angle.
Updoot for Patrick Boyle.
Shit I didn’t know about this. I wonder if there are any funds that won’t buy into this crap.
“permanently” means nothing when it comes to technology
Prices are funny. My last job we were changing clients extra for doing a thing that didn’t cost us anything and was fast to do. How much we charged was completely arbitrary and depended on the partners mood. It’s all made up folks.
Yeah, which is why the “if minimum wage increases, so will prices” aregument is BS. They were going to charge the highest price they thought they could either way, the difference is that they are forced to increase the amount that goes to the people they are trying to pay the least.
This would impact the companies pnl though, so shareholders and c suite will get less money. That’s why they’re scaring people into not wanting to increase wage.
The hilarious irony is that is not even conclusive. There are plenty of studies, both real-world and contrived, that indicate that employers paying more, in broad, yields returns in excess of the added payroll costs.
Not only are there more customers, but increasing pay increases the quality and quantity of labor output.
There is an element of minimum wage increasing, increasing prices because now there are more people that can afford to pay for things.
But yes it isn’t because costs go up, and it really only applies to things people on minimum wage can afford and it’s always less than the increase in wages.
It’s not BS, it’s just not as direct of an impact as they are implying. If payroll is 10% of their expenses (assuming EVERYONE makes minimum wage) then doubling the minimum wage will increase costs by 10%.
Which could be (partially) absorbed from profits, could cause a 10% price hike… or a 50% price hike and fat bonuses for the executives.
it’s a reminder that capitalists put profit over literally everything else. your cost. your wage. everything.
It could also affect the cost of any other inputs that are labour-heavy.
Yeah, fair point.
So it depends on willingness to pay, not cost
“Permanently” lol it’s a subscription and the terms say they can change the price at any time. How is it legal for them to advertise with the word “permanent”?
60% of the time it works every time
Don’t use any of them much and from my limited experience they all seem to be pretty much the same. In fact DeepSeek probably has been a little better than ChatGPT.
As long as you don’t mind them harvesting every tiny bit of data you feed it.
I don’t like the big US players, but at least they’re doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit. Deepseek is not pretending at all. I suppose it’s at least honest and the price point is REALLY tempting. Openclaw gets expensive fast with the number of tokens it consumes. I burned through $30 in two days with it using Claude Haiku/Sonnet. Plugging it into cheap LLM is a nice idea, but no thanks.
I don’t like the big US players, but at least they’re doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit.
Oh, bless your heart, you sweet summer child.
Really depends on your point of view. Personally I see the US AI push as a maximum harvest and it is hard to see the Chinese as being worse. The US has really gone flat out destroying whatever credibility and moral authority they may have had. As I said I don’t use the technology that much and the queries are pretty innocuous, so it may be different for others.
I personally prefer to hand my data to the Chinese. Us is an evil place with evil people nowadays. The Chinese never did anything against me personally.
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lol it’s a subscription
It’s actually API access price, and it’s charged per input + output tokens. $0.87 per million tokens is damn cheap.
They probably have super cheap electricity and it’s possible they use cheap Chinese Ai chips for inference.
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I think it’s meant to convey that it’s not a temporary deal on the old price, but a permanent new price point.
What is the effective difference? It’s not like they’re offering long term contracts.
Likely more to do with communication to customers on sale pages and such, and consequently with customer protection laws. They likely can’t advertise it as a discounted price for example in the same way a seasonal sale would be signposted, I would imagine at least.
Permanent under the current pricing model, subject to change.
Okay I still won’t use it.
Its safety rails are far worse than any in the West. But to your point, fuck AI.
There are plenty of rails, they’re just different ones. Like criticizing dear leader or Tiananmen square.
Blah blah blah blah. China bad. Invading Iran, Venezuela, supporting the genocide in Palestine is all good, getting out of the WHO, removing USAID which had let to thousand of deaths around the world, threathing Greenland and Cuba. Causing global inflation to rise due to oil cost. Tariffs . Destroyed relationships with organizations and countries that took 80 years to build.
And that is just this year for the US.
What catastrophic action on this scale has China in let’s say the last decade?
Its rather revealing that your response to “China has severe restrictions on political speech” is to accuse that person of bootlicking for American empire.
First of all, no one said “The US is good actually.”
Second of all, aren’t you the same type of person who used to cry about USAID being a front for US imperialism? Now you want to complain that it’s gone, because oh wait they were actually helping to contain infectious diseases, provide clean drinking water, and feed people in food scarce areas…
That got shut down last year, by the way, not “just this year.”
As for catastrophic actions China has engaged in, I suppose if you ignore forced assimilations in Tibet and Urumqi, the hostile police takeover of Hong Kong, and the aggressive and environmentally destructive colonization of the South China Sea, then it would start to be somewhat difficult to come up with any examples…
Whataboutwhataboutwhatabout
Two superpowers can be shit at the same time. Three, even. Four is phisically imposible.
You claim someone is biased against China, because they said one true thing, then you bring up all kinds of unrelated things to attack another nation, which wasn’t being discussed. I wonder if you might possess the bias your against, But for China and against the US? Both nations do good and bad things. If you’re so angry about bias, maybe you should check your own. Or maybe bias isn’t the issue, and you just support the Chinese leadership?
“See, China did a bad thing in 1989, while listed here are multiple worse things the US did this year alone. These are equal”
If the US was covering up or hiding these things, they’d at least be comparable. The most relevant comparison would probably be the epstein files, which everyone is already criticizing them for.
The US has literally millions of people in their wars since 1989.
All about energy, and energy cost plays a role here, DeepSeek can go cheaper than western models…
It’s not the whole picture, but I think people would be interested in this :
Should be divided by the population. Unless you are exporting electricity, your production will be based on population. China has 4.2 times the population of the US so they actually produce less renewable energy per citizen than the US.
On that same note, Finland produces 3X the renewable energy per citizen compared with the US.
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Good point. Population usage should be taken into account.
All numbers in AI are made up it’s wild to see tankies glaze DeepSeek’s fake numbers while being skeptical of Western corporations’ numbers
Not glazing when its simply enjoying watching China beat the US at its own game
But the numbers are fake, so it really doesn’t mean much to reduce a fake number by 75%, it isn’t an indicator that DeepSeek is beating anyone at anything.
Cost to end consumer is not a fake number.
What does that number meaningful represent as DeepSeek doing well?
They can afford to lose more money on this? They have lower operating costs? They have a better way to make money of their users?
It could indicate any/all/none of theses
What does that number meaningful represent as DeepSeek doing well? I don’t understand the question
They can afford to lose more money on this? Yes They have lower operating costs? Yes They have a better way to make money of their users? They are not as profit motivated as their competition
I don’t think you understand Deepseek’s role in the market. It’s to intentionally undercut US providers.
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What do you mean by the numbers are fake? Are you saying the worth is over inflated? If that’s the case, of course it is, none too different than virtually any other commodity.
What does that number meaningful represent as DeepSeek doing well?
They can afford to lose more money on this? They have lower operating costs? They have a better way to make money of their users?
It could indicate any/all/none of theses
All I see is good and cheap model. It doesn’t even have to be perfect, just in ballpark of mainstream models.
Them cutting consumer prices doesn’t show that though.
It’s wild that people normally critical of AI boosting will drink Koolaid if it’s China flavored
If someone beats up your bully you have sympathy for them, regardless of the reasons why they beat them.
Most people don’t care about Tiananmen square and politics. And cheap =/= bad. It’s a fallacy
WTH are you on about?
Does being a tankie cause brain damage?
What Tankie brain damage? I use tools that do the job at low cost.
All that and it still won’t talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre
but it will absolutely learn a lot about everyone who wanted to talk about it
DeepSeek never said it was permanent in their pricing materials, the article writer did. They are just taking the current expiration date off an existing discount. It’s absolutely a shot across the bow at Claude, OpenAI, et al., but the author was click-baiting, as is tradition.
No?
The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.
Matter of Interpretation. It’s not a time-limited discount anymore so it’s “permanent” in that sense, but there’s no commitment to not again raise the price later.
Are they eating the cost? How are they able to do it while others are unable to?
They invented a hybrid attention design that drastically reduces the amount of memory needed for the KV cache at inference time. Like, dividing it by 10. And memory is a large part of the cost of inference.
This is a main part of the reason, yes. They actually innovated and did something that pushed the technology forward to be much more efficient, which we first saw with DeepSeek R1 for different reasons.
I see, I will look on some yt video who explain this in depth
The American models are eating their cost big time, in return they get user data to train on and a massive reality distortion field that can theoretically be exploited later. It costs less for DeepSeek to eat their cost, and maybe the value of that user data is worth it now? Maybe there is some Chinese VC getting involved to try and boost DeepSeek with a little reality distortion field they can attempt to exploit later? I don’t know, but all these seem plausible to me.
easy: users pay the difference with their data
Yeah because american tech companies never spy on your or steal your data…
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probably even with duck.ai. nobody could prove they are doing it, even if they are doing it
I don’t use any of tiktok or meta but I believe tiktok is more addictive by design.
i never said that. In fact, openai gives for free 2.5 million of gpt-5.5 tokens every day if you share all your inputs for training.
It was the answer to “why it’s this cheap?” => because it’s subsidized by your data
I think what they meant is “why is this so cheap relative to American competitors since they’re all stealing your data just as much.”
I’m unfamiliar with AI chatbots that you pay for. What is a token?
My understanding is that tokens are basically words, and that when you ask a question it charges for all the tokens it consumes, produces, or processes. There’s a lot of internal processing for each request, where the input text is summarized in different ways and combined with previous parts of the conversation, so it’s not as straightforward as “word count of what you say plus what it says”.
Worth noting that a token is not necessarily a word, though can be. One word could also take multiple tokens. It can also vary from LLM to LLM and their tokenization methods.
There’s a lot of internal processing for each request, where the input text is summarized in different ways and combined with previous parts of the conversation, so it’s not as straightforward as “word count of what you say plus what it says”.
In other words obfuscation so they can charge whatever they want using some obscure formula that only they know.
Not really, there are ways to count tokens before running an inference. Some providers make tokenizers public, so they even work offline. APIs also usually return rolling costs per response and have budget limits - though some could have more fine-grained limits.
Users who are surprised by the bill are usually not paying attention to each call, or using autonomous subagents, or a setup where they have little or no control to what is sent to the provider.
So the problem isn’t really the API provider, as much as it’s the tooling around it, which makes it too easy to overspend.
In very simple terms, a token is more or less a word. You pay per input and output tokens (your prompts and the answers) as they correlate the most closely to the energy expended by the LLM to process your request.
Thank you daddy Xi
Damn, fire sale already?
Still gonna self host it instead (maybe)
FYI the flash model is ~158 GB
How are they running it? Doesn’t the model have to fit in (V)RAM? Does Nvidia have such huge memories in the H cards?
There’s tech for splitting model to run on multiple cards, but it requires really fast interconnect between GPUs.
Lots of GPUs together.
For self hosting it essentially needs to fit in VRAM + RAM but it’ll take a lot of CPU for the part in RAM
Deepseek probably uses those big fancy H cards and not one but several together to increase VRAM.
The destiled models?
I just stumbled upon game Jesus asking some on the same questions.
He makes some good points about IP not being very sacrosanct in China. It sounds like it’s not really a crime to buy and use these chips within China.
The difference in view over intellectual property is sort of fascinating if you think about it. Communism I guess.
Anyway, the real treat here is seeing the guy from Gamer’s Nexus go meet and investigate. He literally followed the source and may have learned another language to do so?
It’s kinda wild.
