[georgeburdell]

No, it’s consistent with what China is doing in other markets, which is dumping product to drive others out of business.

I had a shower thought on how to counteract this, specifically related to the AI dumping. If China is losing substantial money on every token, why wouldn’t an adversary try to maliciously increase consumption? This strategy is not really viable against physical goods dumping because demand is finite and there are large environmental costs. Software demand is infinite and the environmental costs are quite low compared to the financial cost to make it, even with ultra cheap Chinese tokens

[m11a]

Because it's not losing money on each token? Aside from most global people using American inference providers to run the models, I suspect the cloud inference products of the Chinese labs are profitable, at least on the inference costs (ie: not including model training, salaries, etc).

[georgeburdell]

There is no way Deepseek is making money even on inference

[arczyx]

Pretty sure they are making money since on OpenRouter, there are other providers for DeepSeek V4 flash that are charging even less than DeepSeek themselves (eg DeepInfra and Digital Ocean).

https://openrouter.ai/compare/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash/ten...

[georgeburdell]

That says little. Those providers could also be losing money trying to gain marketshare. There is a high amount of speculation in the space and it won’t be apparent for awhile who has a lasting business.

[culi]

That doesn't mean they're making money. Other providers could just be doing it more efficiently. DeepSeek is trying to make its model optimized for Hauwei chips instead of NVIDIA so it has its own constraints