> That blog post is not very compelling either. Without knowing details of the architecture, comparing the various frontier models to open models doesn’t make sense.

Why do you need to know the architecture? Just compare Deepseek V4's performance with GPT 4 and treat internals as a blackbox. Deepseek is much cheaper and way more performant. If you can agree to reasonable assumptions

1. that closed source models are more efficient than open source

2. Deepseek is served at a profit and not a loss

Then it is pretty clear that the prices have gone down. If the prices have gone down more than 20x-30x then surely it is not _still_ subsidised is it?

I think this amount of skepticism is not warranted here. Every reasonable explanation or proxy is met with "but you don't know what they really do" is naive.

It is borderline conspiratorial to believe it this way.