It remains to be seen what the pricing will be when run by non-Deepseek providers. They might be loss leading.
The comparison for cheap models should also be Gemini 2.0 Flash Exp. I could see it being even cheaper when it stops being free - if it does at all. There's definitely a scenario where Google just keeps it freeish for a long time with relatively high limits.
DeepSeek - 0.14$ per million tokens input, 0.28$ million tokens output (66 tokens per/s)
Fireworks - 0.9$ per million tokens input, 0.9$ million tokens output (23 tokens per/s)
DeepInfra - 1$ per million tokens input, 2$ million tokens output (1.27 tokens per/s)
Compared to Llama 3.1 405B (smaller model than this afaik):
Cheapest is 0.8/0.8$ at 24 t/s all the way to 4$/4$ at 8 t/s
So third party cost seems similar, but there aren't many people hosting DeepSeek right now.
DeepSeek - 0.27$ per million tokens input, 1.10$ million tokens output (66 tokens per/s)
Still much cheaper than the others though for input pricing.
[1] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news1226#-api-pricing-upd...
But still certainly cheaper than everyone else at the moment.
these models are being commoditized.
I have a task I use in my work where Gemini 1.5-Pro is SOTA. Handily beating o1, Sonnet-3.5, Gemini-exp and everyone else, very consistently and significantly.
The newer/bigger models are better at reasoning and especially coding, but there's plenty of tasks that have little overlap with those skills.