[odie5533]

Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.

[raincole]

DeepSeek is very likely selling tokens at a loss. There're many cloud providers that provide you with DeepSeek V4 Pro via API, and those services at least twice as expensive as DeepSeek itself.

[raincole]

^Sorry for this understatement. DeepSeek is actually selling tokens at a far cheaper price than my previous comment implied.

DeepSeek V4 Pro price on OpenRouter:

deepseek: $0.435 / $0.87

baidu/fp8: $1.521 / $3.042

novita/fp8: $1.64 / $3.38

Yup. DeepSeek either has next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to, or they're selling at a loss.

[throawayonthe]

> next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to

not necessarily 'next-gen', but they've optimized for the Huawei Ascend 950 right? not a lot of those outside china at least

[surgical_fire]

I see no evidence anywhere that "inference is cheap". To my knowledge this is a myth being spread to pretend ChatGPT or Claude will one day make any economic sense.

DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.