Maybe the Chinese are playing the long game by trying to bankrupt the US competition? Because there's no way this is financially viable.
DeepSeek V4 Pro price on OpenRouter:
deepseek: $0.435 / $0.87
baidu/fp8: $1.521 / $3.042
novita/fp8: $1.64 / $3.38
Yup. DeepSeek either has next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to, or they're selling at a loss.
not necessarily 'next-gen', but they've optimized for the Huawei Ascend 950 right? not a lot of those outside china at least
DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.
Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.
I suspect American inference providers implement the efficiency gains, and pad their margins rather than pass the savings along to the consumer.
It’s going to be hard to enforce it for most consumers though. It’s only going to apply to large corporations in effect.
That being said for coding and most actual “frontier” purposes the American models leave Deepseek in the dust.
For a while, US automakers thought the same of Japanese, then Korean car manufacturers, and Musk laughed at Chinese EV makers in an interview >12 years ago. People learn and get better at making things until they catch up with the frontier.
When VC pulls out, some of them may go bankrupt.