Comment by vidarh
1 day ago
We can tell that the inferencing costs for many of these models are low enough that these models are being sold close to real costs on the basis that many of them are open weight and available from third party providers who have no incentive to subsidize them.
I think the frontier labs will need to drop their high per-token prices at least for their low and mid-level models for the reason that several Chinese models (at least Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM) are "close enough" that with the right harness they are cost effective alternatives.
They won't necessarily need to close the gap - at least not yet -, because these models won't necessarily compete at the same token counts. E.g. at least some of them need to do far more work to solve the same problems.
But, yeah, the prices will come down one way or the other.
At the same time, even the subscriptions for the cheap Chinese models are probably subsidised, and those subscriptions are likely to get less generous over time.
I really doubt Deepseek is subsidised. It's roughly the same price everywhere you look. Deepseek is using the Huawei hardware (as far as I managed to understand from various articles) and hence the savings.
I didn't suggest it was. I pointed out that some of the subscriptions offered by the Chinese labs probably are. Not the per token API prices.
And Chinese electricity prices are some of the lowest
Don't know why people keep parroting this, this is incorrect. Chinese electricity prices are equal or slightly cheaper then most of North America. But significant pockets such as those around the Quebec or other hydro plants are significantly cheaper then Chinese power pricing.
Not only that, China may subsidize AI, but so does the US.
5 replies →
Yeah, this argument is bullshit. You can head over to Openrouter and look at the token cost for deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro. They are very competitive on the open market
Add MiMo 2.5 to the list. Priced like DeepSeek, performs similarly but it also has vision capability.