DeepSeek to Make Permanent 75% Discount on Flagship AI Model(www.bloomberg.com)
46 pointsby moh_maya2 hours ago17 comments
  • Nifty39297 minutes ago
    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.

    • Aboutplantsa minute ago
      I believe you are right. These models are at worst a 6 month lag to the costly frontier models, but the ability to scale energy production is years ahead of where the US is. That advantage is often under appreciated
    • ufish2355 minutes ago
      What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?
      • infecto2 minutes ago
        I have not fully seen or appreciated most of the negativity. Obviously there are exceptions to that but in my eyes it has largely exposed how vulnerable the west is due to poor infrastructure constructs and a lack of building out generation and transmission.
      • Nifty39294 minutes ago
        Yes, and yes!
  • syntaxing2 minutes ago
    It’s wild. Regardless of Deepseek direct pricing, on Openrouter itself, the pricing for Pro is comparable to Haiku. Flash is even cheaper. You get Opus 4.5 and better than Sonnet 4.6 performance.
  • bwfan123an hour ago
    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.
  • adi_pradhan11 minutes ago
    Great headline cost reduction, but has anyone here actually used the API in production?

    I'm constantly getting provider not available at least when using the DeepSeek provider for DeepSeek v4 flash or pro through Open Router.

    It seems like there isn't enough capacity to actually serve production traffic

    • olcay_7 minutes ago
      I'm using the official API and I've had no issues.
    • bugglebeetle8 minutes ago
      Use their API directly, this is an openrouter issue. I ran something like 5 billion tokens through them directly recently without any bumps in the road.
  • stormdennis7 minutes ago
    One thing that I find annoying is that it gives results like a teleprinter and so overall takes longer
  • revolvingthrow18 minutes ago
    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.
  • pcwelder12 minutes ago
    None of the deepseek models are multimodal. How are you guys able to use it in daily work without image input?

    For example it's just so natural to share screenshots in a chat.

  • daniel_iversen30 minutes ago
    I'm quite sure (and you could find it somewhere of course) that the Chinese models would've been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views. Even so, at what point is even the quality risk (assuming your use case won't be affected by those adjustments) and any potential privacy concerns outweighed by the fact that it's literally an order of magnitude (and sometimes multiple, for output tokens etc!) cheaper than the US frontier models?
    • nicce18 minutes ago
      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.
      • spiderfarmer6 minutes ago
        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.
    • solenoid093728 minutes ago
      I suspect for many companies, the sunk cost of tokens relative to the output gain is low. The productivity gain we get from AI is such that using the latest Opus or GPT far outweighs the cost savings using a non frontier Chinese model.

      Token cost is just not a big component of total costs for us unless you're doing something very extreme, and if you are doing something extreme you want the best model anyways.

      • out_of_protocol21 minutes ago
        Did anybody compared these directly using exactly same prompts and harness? I assume V4 Pro could be real frontier model, and if it's true, it'd be better to use it in automation or routine steps instead of simple models (e.g. haiku or even sonnet if V4pro is better)
    • Petersipoi21 minutes ago
      I'm quite sure that the American models have been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views
      • estearum18 minutes ago
        Right, but they're ones that are more concordant with the leanings and world views of the people and businesses that frequent this forum.

        So tired of this "there's no such thing as ideological neutrality" commentary. We get it. Move on. Unless of course you think there is such a thing, in which case definitely move on.

    • lot-xcvb17 minutes ago
      For the average Western citizen it is more privacy invasive to use Western models. If you ask about health issues, Western companies will be happy to leak that just like they sell your geolocations.

      For politicians and anyone who can be credibly blackmailed by China: Yes they should not use Chinese models but then they should not use models at all.

      For z.ai the political bias by default is Western (if you connect from the West). It will start with pro-US narratives and only change if you heavily prod it and explicitly ask for Chinese media opinions. Yes, it censors Tiananmen but that is just a gimmick. Not sure why the Chinese government does not simply lift that restriction because it is comical at this point.

      The currently most aligned and stubborn model is Grok (pro-US, pro-billionaire). The rest can always be persuaded with the appropriate prompts.

  • matchbok317 minutes ago
    Is this being done ahead of the big IPOs coming this year? Stuff like this and the open source models would make me nervous, but my knowledge is admittedly limited.
  • garbawarb33 minutes ago
    Right before OpenAI's IPO. The boldness.
  • FfejL27 minutes ago
    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.
    • amelius20 minutes ago
      At least we're not thinking that it is God. Is there a name for that test?
    • idiotsecant26 minutes ago
      That was always what the turning test was, even according to turing ...
  • 2 hours ago
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  • rvz32 minutes ago
    While Anthropic, OpenAI and Google continue to charge an expensive amount of $$$ for in/output per million tokens and Microsoft complaining that AI costs more than hiring humans [0] and changes their pricing, it appears that Jevons paradox applies only to Deepseek.

    This is why companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of "safety" when what Deepseek is doing is racing everyone to $0 through cheap inference.

    It is also why right now in the US, Jevons paradox does not apply there and why you hear one executive at Nvidia [1] talking about why it is more expensive to run these models than it is to hire humans and is talking to the data center partners including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google betting that the opposite will be true once it is ready. That could take years.

    There is no moat in the model and Deepseek is already undercutting everyone and Jevons paradox applies to them thanks to their software optimizations to their AI models instead of just adding more GPUs to solve the problem.

    Good.

    [0] https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok...

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941609

    • k1musab116 minutes ago
      They started with a well-timed sale right at the release of V4, when Anthropic was publically forced to admit they've been playing with the models in the background wasting peoples money, and Copilot pricing scheme changed pricing out top Opus models into higher tiers. DS sale got expanded to whole of May, as I'm sure they saw a trove of people feeding their tasks to them in parallel with their bad experience with Anthropic. This dynamic reaction to overall situation is refreshing to see.
    • gruez22 minutes ago
      >There is no moat in the model.

      What's the "moat" in giving models away for free? Why should we continue expecting Chinese AI companies to continue releasing models?

      • bryanlarsen17 minutes ago
        The article is about the pricing of the flagship non-free DeepSeek model.
  • 3419ara37 minutes ago
    I have no idea why people celebrate this. It is replacing one feudal lord by another.

    We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on.

    If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.

    • estearum15 minutes ago
      Well it's not replacing one with the other. It's creating competition between them, which in so doing weakens each one.
    • idiotsecant27 minutes ago
      How is it a 'feudal lord'? These are local models.
  • WarmWash18 minutes ago
    Chinese models will always be cheap because you are also paying for it by handing over whatever you are working on (or saying) to the party, and China has no short history of copying everything it can get it's hands on from the west.

    China has no separation between business and state. So deep seek servers are defacto party servers.

    Running it local is fine, but that's free anyway.

    Edit: Like clockwork the shills flow in to hide this info. I'm sure the whataboutism will follow soon. Nothing I said is false, so the best they can do is hide/redirect.

    • ben8bit13 minutes ago
      The biggest problem we face in the west is thinking our institutions are somehow different. Be critical of the product all you want, but don't pretend the exact same thing isn't happening here.
    • 0511 minutes ago
      Worst thing China can do is steal your IP if you’re not a Chinese national and have no ties to China. Worst thing US can do is use your chat history in court against you. Still safer to use Chinese servers if local is not an option for the task.
    • gchamonlive13 minutes ago
      All I see is healthy competition
    • miroljub12 minutes ago
      Quick reminder that US data protection doesn't apply to non US customers. Companies are not even allowed to disclose their spying.
  • comrade123439 minutes ago
    Reminds me of this parking ramp I used to use occasionally. I'd park for hours and when leaving the guy in the booth would tell me the charge and it would always be ridiculously low, like $0.50 or $1.00. Definitely not enough to pay for the guy to sit in the booth.

    The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.

    • bryanlarsen19 minutes ago
      IIUC, most parking lots are real estate plays -- the real money is in flipping the land; money made from parking tolls is gravy.
      • estearum15 minutes ago
        Land value tax fixes this
    • krige37 minutes ago
      Perhaps keeping the booth guy employed was the real point.