Yeah I guess two companies who would otherwise be considered going for bankruptcy have models too expensive to run. As they don't see themselves making money any time soon, they have to turn every future model into a weird fascination.
If the difference is that large, it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share, this is not exactly the first time the Chinese government has done so (or at least been rumoured to have done so).
You should assume that everyone has a hidden agenda when money is involved.
> it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share
In this case, this point is kinda moot since the entire US and SV tech ecosystem, has been subsidized first by the US defense industry during the cold war, and after by the US government funded VCs by its unique cheat-code ability to infinitely print the world reserve currency with little to no inflation consequences upon its own economy, and dump it on its tech sector or on the free market to buy foreign competitors before they become a challenge, in order to be ahead of everyone else.
Given this, I find criticisms of China's state subsidize to pale in comparison, when we talk about what is "fair".
> You should assume that everyone has a hidden agenda when money is involved.
As an European there is little difference between what US is doing and China is doing when it comes to tactics. The particulars may differ, the end result is similar. Traditionally I could at least say that US was more democratic and as such was preferable, but that argument seems to be gradually weakening.
Why do other model providers who host deepseek v4 have it cheaper than other offerings? Is the Chinese government subsidizing other model providers who download their models for free?
Pricing for DeepSeek V4 flash is $0.14 in/$0.28 out across basically every provider or close to it. It seems most providers just follow the model creator and set their prices to match. V4 pro was set to be $1.74 in/$3.48 out when DeepSeek first announced it; all providers have set their prices to be about that price, & now DeepSeek has set their pricing to $0.435 in/ $0.87 out. I don't know if this is special pricing, or the promise they made for dropping the price when they get more Huawei cards online. It seems that providers like ParaSail, Together, and Novita just set the price when the model comes out and don't compete.
No one has yet to turn a profit from LLMs. I don't understand why we need to intently look at everybody's pricing, when the most important number is instead their losses. That is the number that tells us what they're really doing.
Why would these 3rd-party providers be taking losses? Together, Novita, etc... are not losing money on inference services, they are profiting. You can easily do napkin math with current & last gen Nvidia cards to calculate cost to host/serve these models. I would also doubt that any 1st-party providers like OpenAI and Anthropic lose money on per token billing. There is almost undoubtedly healthy margin being made on that.
And it’s not even at a release stage - Deepseek v4 is still at beta, and llama.cpp doesn’t even support it yet.
Once it gets to release (they have said they are still adding features and multi-modes like vision) and llama supports it, I think you’ll see a huge asymmetric price point between east and west SOTA models
It’s their promo price till the end of May. It’s also not nearly as good as 5.5. I’ve had 3 different tasks just this week that deepseek has failed at that 5.5 does perfectly.
I just tried to do some large scale summarization and Deepseek v4 pro is pretty shit. This cannot even touch 5.5. 5.5 took 3 mins and the output was stellar, Deepseek took 20 and did not adhere to the output format at all after multiple attempts.
There's a story to tell in that:
1) Google has a transformer-based AI that hallucinates too much to release
2) OpenAI replicates the tech then YOLOs it
3) Everyone says: look how Google is getting left behind! Google thinks: the second mouse gets the cheese.
4) Google gets the cheese, OpenAI is absorbed by Microsoft or just disappears (or both).
TPUs were their real moat. All that capacity used throughout their suite of products on non-chatbot features, ready to rip for consumers once soon as somebody else opened the floodgates to the public.
Now all their competitors lose money on every token paying their cloud providers (of course it's funny money, maybe they're just giving the cloud providers equity) while Google is sitting calmly over there, actually owning everything they need for any eventuality, and beholden to nobody.
It can be both and I don't know how much I would trust the USG as the canary in the coal mine given their technical readiness typically seems low across most institutions in that they are probably more exposed because they haven't shored up their systems.
People keep on mentioning gpt2, but it's worth recalling that back in 2019 it was basically the first model that was capable of zero-shot generation of coherent multi-paragraph text. Having it write security exploits like Mythos wasn't even on the radar. Rather, the concerns were about misuse and societal implications, which in retrospect were pretty prescient: https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-6-month-follow-up/
I doubt it. By not releasing it, Chinese companies will be unable to break TOS and use it to acquire high quality training data...which, I suspect, is how they've kept pace
Z.AI, Moonshot, DeepSeek all have a pipeline of data of their own now due to capturing a slice of the market through cheap tokens. It's not impossible to imagine that they might share the data too if the CCP thinks that will help their AI strategy.
No. Most data generated this way is poor quality. It's not the user responses and or queries. If the user does not know better than the LLM, you can generate bad responses. The value is in taking a superior model, submitting a query, and getting a higher quality output than you yourself could have generated, and using that to boost your model.
I'm not entirely up to date on each week's LLM hype train/scandal but last I heard there was no public access to it or public-trusted 3rd parties that can review model's capabilities
You are up to date. Mythos had unauthorized access because of poor security but that's it as far as I know. Not exactly a good sign for something being advertised as a weapon...
It’s easy to end up with no public-trusted third parties if we arbitrarily distrust third parties who say the capabilities match what’s promised. Mozilla for example says it found hundreds of Firefox vulnerabilities, and I think it’s pretty unlikely they’re lying to cover Anthropic’s back.