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Comment by kingstnap | Hacker News Reader

Given that MiMo is as cheap as Deepseek ( previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282814 ) multiplying that by 3x for ultra speed is still shockingly cheap.

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MiMo and DeepSeek are not cheap. Anthropic and OpenAI are expensive for what they provide.

The Chinese "Neijuan" is real & well reported: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i...

It is another thing the BigLabs accuse open weight models of benefiting from distillation & other techniques & essentially avoid higher training costs (which typically bleed into bills end users pay for inference).

Ex A: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

Ex B: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/openai-accuses-deepseek-...

True, but why would end users care about that? If anything, training on synthetic AI output is more ethical than on scraped human works (of course, not to say the Chinese labs aren't doing the latter)

We buy cheap Chinese goods all the time. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In this case, at least it’s threatening multimillion dollar salary jobs instead of entire towns of working class people in America or Mexico.

And the Chinese labs actually release their weights. You could call it… open AI.

Lololol.

Big labs ripped videos off YouTube without caring about the ToS, and grabbed as much published literature they could get their hands on, regardless of legality (Books3, The Pile). The goal of "democratizing human knowledge" by way of thinking machines is far too noble to worry about frivolities like copyright and authorial consent, they said. Until it was their output being exploited, and their earning potential threatened.

Chinese are also simply better at making a lot of things cheaper, e.g. solar panels or electric vehicles.

We just had years of US model providers arguing it was fine to rip off the world’s cultural output for their own profit, why should their work be treated any different?

You don't consider Input $0.435 Output $0.87 cache read $0.003625 per million tokens for near frontier intelligence cheap?

No. They still have enormous profit margins on inference with these prices.

Any source to backup this claim, pretty please?

Source? There are a countless number of providers serving open weight models for fun and profit.

Their margins doesn't impact my own assessment of end user pricing as cheap.

I highly doubt there is any margin on those inference pricing.

> I highly doubt there is any margin on those inference pricing.

And yet, OpenCode Go offers DeepSeek flash 6 times cheaper than DeepSeek itself. And they claim they are still profitable.

Part of their model is that not everyone will use their entire quota each month. I don't think I will. I use under $1/day with deepseek v4 flash. We get $60 for the $10 sub.

It’s near the frontier meaning it’s the best intelligence for the price.

It’s not even close to frontier meaning it’s the best intelligence.

I hardly notice DeepSeek being inferior to Claude Opus unless I have it working on tricky and under-defined problems. That is, I trust Opus to reason much better when it has the choice. Otherwise, IME DeepSeek is far cheaper and more effective for anything where the solution is even somewhat obvious.

Out of curiosity, what is your stack? And is this in a legacy project or new one?

I have tried using deep seek flash and pro but they make amateur mistakes. Sonnet level at best.

However v4 flash is absolutely amazing as a generalist model and it’s what we’re using on a product built on top of LLMs. I wish I could code with it but it’s not going to happen anytime soon

I've used it across many new projects as well as many legacy ones. It does make amateur mistakes so you can't leave it unsupervised for hours like I do with Claude, but it's so much cheaper that weeks of heavy usage haven't even cost me $10 yet. Only other downside IMO is that Pro is pretty slow, even compared to frontier models; only around 120t/s IIRC.

Yes I also noticed it is pretty slow, which sort of defeated the purpose of using it for me.

Usually I'm working on a large task, typically with Opus, while also having a bunch of smaller tasks in their own independent worktrees. Those still need supervision, but less. My goal was to get deepseek to drive the cost of those down, but it was too slow and unreliable...

Yes, I could tolerate the unreliability better if it were faster, but it's really not. So it's too slow for me to actively supervise it, but too unreliable for me to trust it unsupervised. The shitty middle. I often have multiple of them open at a time and check my terminal every few minutes to lead them along. Mostly works.

Energy is likely more abundant in China. I am not sure about compute, but that must be part of reason for such drastic price differences.

They also don't have to inflate profits for a coming IPO.

They're leaving us in the dust on solar, while our current administration is still trying to put people in the ground to dig up more coal and die of black lung. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

They're building more coal than anyone.

Also more nuclear than anyone, which one must assume you hate, because preferring solar requires you don't actually understand thing

Energy from coal in China decreased last year. The change is happening very quickly.

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