Comment by nl

There's a difference between the Deepseek.com provider lunch pricing and the pricing every other provider is doing now.

Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1].

It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5].

The OpenCode CEO said: "inference is very profitable and probably a good opportunity to understand some basic business math"[2] and "the inference we do is already profitable and that's with some middlemen involved"[3]

If at this point people don't believe inference can be profitable, and providers can turn the prices up and down to choose exactly how profitable they make it I don't know what to say.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813#provider...

[1.5] https://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-inference-is-obviously-profi...

[2] https://x.com/thdxr/status/2042277156940587469?lang=en

[3] https://x.com/thdxr/status/2042614323344818520