It's possible they've finally integrated cheap(er) chinese chips. It's also possible they're just subsidising inference for real-world usage data. Interesting either way.
Like I responded to someone else:
- Cheap electricity - Cheap, domestically produced GPUs - Efficiency research. (a lot of it from Deepseek's research)
Also, the Chinese government wants the AI to be as accessible as EVs so everyone will use it.
Only artificial barriers will keep people using some of the frontier stuff in a couple of years. No costs will justify.
Same reason they release some of the models for free: They are trying to capture market share.
Their only moat is maybe being SOTA but that only lasts so long before everyone else catches up.
Also, DSv4 has access to Huawei Ascend GPUs that have native FP4 that allows all-native FP4+FP8 mixed compute that is more efficient than emulated FP4. Less so for 3rd party providers.