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Comment by xgstation | Hacker News Reader

> This is one reason why Deepseek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.

This one does not make sense to me at all.

Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.

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DeepSeek permanently cut its V4-pro API prices by 75% because they were too expensive. Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens.

Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.

China also have trust issue with American companies. Most of State-owned companies will not use those services even if they can directly access them.

And? The US feds wont allow even local Qwen or Deepseek models either. "Evul godless commies" or some such nonsense.

Urm, no? I man they did cut prices by 75% that part is true - but they reduced a starting price that was below sonnet.

Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.

Is there a contradiction here? If resold Opus tokens are sold at a 93% discount, you can be a lot cheaper than Sonnet while also a lot more expensive than resold Opus tokens.

I see, After rereading the comment I was responding to I realized I probably misread/misinterpreted what they wanted to convey.

I think there isn't a contradiction and I was just confused. The price may have been discounted only to get below the price point of opus resellers. I do not have enough information on that to make any clear determination on that topic.

If other providers can match Deepseek's first party prices, that probably means that the economics for running inferencing work out for them.

> Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens.

You mean it's functionally as if American tokens are being price dumped in China and Chinese model providers are being forced to compete with that and innovate? So many delicious layers of irony, lol :-P

It's somewhat difficult to have any sympathy for Anthropic here. They're entirely responsible for selling tokens at below cost, with the age-old bait-and-switch tactic.

If they weren't doing so, then these Chinese resellers wouldn't be viable. Radical idea, but how about they actually charge a viable price, even on subscription plans?

If resold Anthropic tokens undercut even the at-cost open-weight model tokens, because they're reselling subsidized subscription tokens, then you'd have to start selling open-weight model tokens at a loss in order to match them.

Also, wouldn't that claim only hold in China?

I'm an European and I'm not using those proxys the article describes.

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