Deepseek had another moment a few weeks ago. V4 isn't far behind the US frontier, and so far its flash variant seems a very reliable coder and costs a pittance.
Deepseek V4 (not flash) trippled in price too by the way (from Deepseek). Get used to this pattern.
This is what you get for relying on the generosity of billionaires. Keep offshoring your thinking ability to a machine and let me know how competitive you. Hint, you wont be. There's nothing special about being able to use an LLM.
Anyone can host Deepseek V4 on rented GPUs and sell inference on it. Price will very quickly converge to the marginal cost of inference. This is as close to a pure commodity as it gets in the AI space so competitive market economics will put in work. Same is true for any open-weights model.
You dont understand the costs involved to run inference at scale
Please go run some numbers.The hardware needed to Run Deepseek v4 flash at 20 tps for a single session is nowhere close to what is required to run it at 50tps for 5,000 concurrent sessions.
Imagine what it takes to be profitible when running at 150 tps for 30cents per 1mm. You make less than 1k per month and the hardware required to run that cost 10k a month to rent with hardly any concurrent session capability.
- That's 800 * 60 * 60 generated tokens per hour, at a cost of $0.87 per 1M tokens, or $2.50 per hour.
- For input and output tokens, the math is a bit more complicated because we have to make assumptions about their ratio. Using the published values from OpenCode, we get another $2.50 for cached tokens (which are almost free for DeepSeek) and another $3.40 for input tokens (which are a lot cheaper to compute than output tokens), which gives us a total of $8.50 per hour per B300 GPU.
- B300 GPUs can be rented for as low as $3.40 per hour, which is less than $8.50, so hosting DeepSeek V4 Pro is profitable.
You could also host it at fewer tps per user to raise the efficiency and therefore the profit even higher.
Even not assuming Blackwell inference the $3.50/hr price is likely close to the marginal cost. The Deepseek R0 model is a little more than a third of the size of V4 and cost around $1/Mtok to serve at scale based on deepseek's blogs last year and Hopper rental prices.
Yes it is more efficient in $/tok to run at scale than to run just for yourself. Everyone selling Deepseek V4 inference is selling an undifferentiated good. They have run the numbers on how much it costs and are competing against a dozen other outfits also selling undifferentiated open weights tokens. Whatever the dollar cost they face to rent those GPUs will be what they are able to charge in the competitive market. That is great for you and me because we can buy tokens at pretty much exactly what it costs to produce them.
They are selling it below costs and training on your tool calling, and potentially all your data. They're selling it for cheap to get your data dumbass.
Actually, deepseek v4 was 1/3 promotional price for the first month or so. This was pretty clearly communicated. The promotions window just ended is all.
If you run out of 50% coupons to your local pizza joint, did they double their prices? Does every company double or triple their prices after Black Friday?
There’s a pretty significant difference between saying someone tripled their prices, and a temporary promotion ended. It’s even more so the case if someone is using it as an example for raising prices as a trend.
I’m 100% in the camp that prices are going up and quality is going down; companies are retiring models and requiring you to use more expensive ones. This has happened to me and there are dozens of examples that one can point to.
But a promotion ending is a strawman argument and does the point a disservice.
> If you run out of 50% coupons to your local pizza joint, did they double their prices?
Yes. Did they double their msrp? no. They did double their effective price relative to me which is all that matters unless you're doing economic math or something.
The original comment was used as proof of a trend that vendors are raising prices. Would running out of coupons indicate a trend in rising pizza prices?
You're typing as your handwriting and letter sending abilities deteriorate to dust. Writing down information as your memory capacity decays. Remembering instead of living at the pure leading edge of perception dulling your reactions.
Smh, it's all downhill from the first unadulterated neuron.
Mate why are you so mad at people upset the price trippeled? It's a fair complaint that people built services using the cheaper ones with the expectation future models would be similarly priced. You can avoid 'offloading thinking' while still building ontop of these models
Actually, why should Google collude on pricing? They have deep pockets and could starve out the competition while keeping prices low, if they really wanted.
I think it is priced high because it's basically their smartest model as well as their fastest, so why shouldn't they?
You can still use earlier generations of Flash at a lower cost if you want "fast and cheap and just OK," which often makes sense. (Just checked)
I would predict they will lower this price when 3.5 High appears, but perhaps not all the way.
This is what you get for relying on the generosity of billionaires. Keep offshoring your thinking ability to a machine and let me know how competitive you. Hint, you wont be. There's nothing special about being able to use an LLM.