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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

The artificialanalysis cost per task chart has DeepSeek as the clear winner and Fable as the clear loser. But I would still pick Fable for some tasks, so that also can't be all there is to it.

But I agree that price per token figure is not great. It seems even the tokens per character can vary between models, so it's basically useless.

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Wow, you weren't kidding. I looked at their chart, and the cost-per-task for Fable is more than double Sol's. And DeepSeek absolutely stomps. Four cents per-task vs Sol's $1 and Fable's $3.

I might need to check out DeepSeek more. I had no idea the difference was this obscene. Makes me wonder if something's off with the benchmark. A 70x cost reduction vs. Fable seems too good to be true.

In my benchmarks of security auditing abilities of models, DeepSeek was roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than either GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8, less than ten cents per task vs. roughly a buck each for the best American models at the time.

GPT 5.5 Pro was ~230x at almost $23 per task.

DeepSeek is my go-to when I need an API, and local Gemma 4 won't do because it's either too slow or not capable enough. DeepSeek isn't at the frontier but it's good enough for a lot of things, very cheap, and quite fast. Flash is even faster and cheaper, and still better than anything I can host locally.

Almost as if centuries of passing the imperial exam by either skill or cheating influenced Chinese culture a lot.

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