Yep, with Reasonix, DeepSeek is free real estate. Seems to just go and go for pennies.
And, DeepSeek is what I use for any task that works best with an API. It's cheap enough to where I don't think about cost, made even cheaper by DeepSeek having the most effective and cheap caching in the industry, and it's good enough to where I rarely have to follow up with a more expensive model or manually fix things. It's been alleged they're releasing an update to DeepSeek V4 Pro soon that improves it, which likely makes it a good fit for even more kinds of problems. It remains my favorite of the Chinese models, it's so cheap and cheerful. And, is also less aggressively censored than some of them.
Maybe I’m not pushing them hard enough but I use Claude opus at work and deepseek v4 flash at home and they both seem about as capable. While deepseek is borderline free.
The more important question than subsidy is what is the tokenomics of running the model. If it's inefficient to run on an nvl72 cluster (or whatever the heck has enough vram to run a 3T parameter model), and k3 isn't very token efficient, then it might not be that compelling of an open weights model.
3T at nxfp4 (which is most of it) is only 1.5TB of vram - so 8x288GB B300 or MI355 will do it if you are careful with context - maybe dp-attn? Certainly not TP. 2 of those together can easily serve it. The new AMD MI400 are at 400GB+ each, so 8x of them will nicely fit with KV to spare.
Subsidization could affect both of those. If you have $200B in the bank you can afford to throw massive compute at every single request; if you are less well funded, you might throttle more aggressively.
Additionally that same VC could be (read: is always) spent on developing the harness, and other infrastructure around the model, not just the model itself.
So it's apples-to-oranges when comparing a relatively new model to established competitors (i.e. OpenAI @ $900B funding vs Moonshot/Kimi's $30B FYI) because every new model they release is judged on "performance" which is not strictly speaking derived solely from the model.
It's possible Moonshot could get similar performance over time as the build out the rest of the infrastructure. We have no way of knowing how much of OpenAI/Anthropic's success is due to the model vs intelligent tooling built on top of it.
From the end of the month it will be served profitably by other providers around the world, like Kimi K2.6
Sure, but at those API rates it doesn't beat the subscription plans for OpenAI.
Not sure how the economics work for the Chinese models, but DeepSeek did the same task for a dime.
In my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases, DeepSeek is still the most cost-effective model by a mile. $10 feels like it lasts forever.
Yep, with Reasonix, DeepSeek is free real estate. Seems to just go and go for pennies.
And, DeepSeek is what I use for any task that works best with an API. It's cheap enough to where I don't think about cost, made even cheaper by DeepSeek having the most effective and cheap caching in the industry, and it's good enough to where I rarely have to follow up with a more expensive model or manually fix things. It's been alleged they're releasing an update to DeepSeek V4 Pro soon that improves it, which likely makes it a good fit for even more kinds of problems. It remains my favorite of the Chinese models, it's so cheap and cheerful. And, is also less aggressively censored than some of them.
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Maybe I’m not pushing them hard enough but I use Claude opus at work and deepseek v4 flash at home and they both seem about as capable. While deepseek is borderline free.
Does it matter? As an end user I really only care about 1) how much I can do in a week, and 2) how long each task takes.
Subsidies would affect 1, but not 2. But if some VC wants to subsidize my Claude or Codex or whatever, awesome.
The more important question than subsidy is what is the tokenomics of running the model. If it's inefficient to run on an nvl72 cluster (or whatever the heck has enough vram to run a 3T parameter model), and k3 isn't very token efficient, then it might not be that compelling of an open weights model.
3T at nxfp4 (which is most of it) is only 1.5TB of vram - so 8x288GB B300 or MI355 will do it if you are careful with context - maybe dp-attn? Certainly not TP. 2 of those together can easily serve it. The new AMD MI400 are at 400GB+ each, so 8x of them will nicely fit with KV to spare.
It doesn't matter if you can switch easily. It might matter if there are barriers to switching.
Subsidization could affect both of those. If you have $200B in the bank you can afford to throw massive compute at every single request; if you are less well funded, you might throttle more aggressively.
Additionally that same VC could be (read: is always) spent on developing the harness, and other infrastructure around the model, not just the model itself.
So it's apples-to-oranges when comparing a relatively new model to established competitors (i.e. OpenAI @ $900B funding vs Moonshot/Kimi's $30B FYI) because every new model they release is judged on "performance" which is not strictly speaking derived solely from the model.
It's possible Moonshot could get similar performance over time as the build out the rest of the infrastructure. We have no way of knowing how much of OpenAI/Anthropic's success is due to the model vs intelligent tooling built on top of it.