It would be hilarious if Chinese companies were the ones that punctured the investment bubble around AI in America.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Yes, almost like that's why there's a bubble despite the obvious disparity between both states' ability to maintain an adequate infrastructure for this technology. US companies are looting with the full expectation that the cost of the economic fallout will be shifted to taxpayers. They're getting as much value out of this before China inevitably becomes dominant even in the US sphere of influence as the US simply will never be able to compete after decades of neoliberal politics and the erosion of public works.
Are they eating the cost? How are they able to do it while others are unable to?
They invented a hybrid attention design that drastically reduces the amount of memory needed for the KV cache at inference time. Like, dividing it by 10. And memory is a large part of the cost of inference.
This is a main part of the reason, yes. They actually innovated and did something that pushed the technology forward to be much more efficient, which we first saw with DeepSeek R1 for different reasons.
I see, I will look on some yt video who explain this in depth
The American models are eating their cost big time, in return they get user data to train on and a massive reality distortion field that can theoretically be exploited later. It costs less for DeepSeek to eat their cost, and maybe the value of that user data is worth it now? Maybe there is some Chinese VC getting involved to try and boost DeepSeek with a little reality distortion field they can attempt to exploit later? I don't know, but all these seem plausible to me.
easy: users pay the difference with their data
Yeah because american tech companies never spy on your or steal your data...
i never said that. In fact, openai gives for free 2.5 million of gpt-5.5 tokens every day if you share all your inputs for training.
It was the answer to "why it's this cheap?" => because it's subsidized by your data
I think what they meant is "why is this so cheap relative to American competitors since they're all stealing your data just as much."
LOL right? Like does the other person not realize that unless your running a local LLM or using something like duck.ai ALL of the AIs are training on your convos. It reminds me of all the "Chinese Surveillance" fearmongering around TikTok as if Meta and Instagram don't do the exact same thing.
All that and it still won’t talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre
but it will absolutely learn a lot about everyone who wanted to talk about it
DeepSeek never said it was permanent in their pricing materials, the article writer did. They are just taking the current expiration date off an existing discount. It's absolutely a shot across the bow at Claude, OpenAI, et al., but the author was click-baiting, as is tradition.
No?
The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.
Matter of Interpretation. It's not a time-limited discount anymore so it's "permanent" in that sense, but there's no commitment to not again raise the price later.
I just stumbled upon game Jesus asking some on the same questions.
He makes some good points about IP not being very sacrosanct in China. It sounds like it's not really a crime to buy and use these chips within China.
The difference in view over intellectual property is sort of fascinating if you think about it. Communism I guess.
Anyway, the real treat here is seeing the guy from Gamer's Nexus go meet and investigate. He literally followed the source and may have learned another language to do so?
It's kinda wild.
All about energy, and energy cost plays a role here, DeepSeek can go cheaper than western models...
It's not the whole picture, but I think people would be interested in this :
Should be divided by the population. Unless you are exporting electricity, your production will be based on population. China has 4.2 times the population of the US so they actually produce less renewable energy per citizen than the US.
On that same note, Finland produces 3X the renewable energy per citizen compared with the US.
I disagree. While most things are best measured per capita dividing it this way is kind of silly. China uses MUCH less energy per person than the US. As does every country. So it's not really a useful comparison. It's better to look at the percentage of total energy usage by country that is renewables. Dividing it by person ignores the fact that the average USian just uses an absolute metric fuckton of energy day to day. Like many times the global average. For China specifically, the average US person uses 2.5-3x more energy than the average Chinese person.
Good point. Population usage should be taken into account.
“Permanently” lol it’s a subscription and the terms say they can change the price at any time. How is it legal for them to advertise with the word “permanent”?
lol it’s a subscription
It's actually API access price, and it's charged per input + output tokens. $0.87 per million tokens is damn cheap.
They probably have super cheap electricity and it's possible they use cheap Chinese Ai chips for inference.
It is not just possible. They do use domestic Huawei chips. The Ascend 950 specifically. Which is a big part of why they can operate so much more cheaply. No need to buy those insanely expensive NVIDIA chips.
china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid
In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance
This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh
The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.
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Prices are funny. My last job we were changing clients extra for doing a thing that didn’t cost us anything and was fast to do. How much we charged was completely arbitrary and depended on the partners mood. It’s all made up folks.
So it depends on willingness to pay, not cost
Yeah, which is why the "if minimum wage increases, so will prices" aregument is BS. They were going to charge the highest price they thought they could either way, the difference is that they are forced to increase the amount that goes to the people they are trying to pay the least.
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