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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I use DeepSeek. I'm very familiar with open models. I run a popular benchmark to check their progress.

DeepSeek is somewhere between Sonnet and Opus in capability, for much lower price.

Their $0.87 per million output tokens is one of the few API offerings that is probably subsidized (the break-even price is probably around $2 judging by[1])

I think Anthropic and OpenAI's margins will erode some over time. But I think they are very profitable now on the API prices they are charging, and their margins will remain healthy.

Put it like this: AWS is a very expensive way of getting compute, and there are numerous competitors that are much cheaper.And yet AWS is very profitable.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers

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I find that Deepseek Pro to be below Sonnet 4.6 for much of the coding/review/executing tasks from plan. The only good thing it has going is the price. It will is cheaper for it to crunch through your well worked out implementation plans, it's slower, makes more errors, needs more tokens to fix those. And even at that increased spent it does deliver in the end. More tokens, lower cost, slower.

I use it as something that sits right below Sonnet for daily tasks that can be run in loops with validation checks, perfect. Anything more advanced...it just doesn't cut it.

Same experience with z-ai glm 5.1 btw... don't know what system prompt magic antrophic set in front of their Sonnet 4.6, but it does execute tasks efficiently.

claiming any of these deepseek models are close to opus is a bit optimistic

I use Claude at work, DeepSeek at home.

For software development, I notice no difference. For all the work I did using AI, DeepSeek is as capable as claude.

Have you tried other tools like windsurf? Or other free open source Ai?

I never tried Windsurf, no.

I tried DeepSeek and MiMo through both Claude Code and Pi.dev. I found Claude Code a slightly better harness, but I still have both installed and switch around frequently.

As for "open source AI", what exactly are you talking about? Is it open models?

I tried some through Ollama, but I don't have the hardware to run decent models.

Did you mean Sonnet and Opus?

Yes, edited, thanks.

Sure!

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