Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
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.