Comment by bayesianbot
18 hours ago
1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead.
btw I've had a ton of fun with the new deepseek today, I was waiting for my OpenAI 5h limit reset and decided to give it some problems for fun, got pretty great results. Tried some harder problems and still got great results. I don't expect it to be Sol class or anything but I really didn't expect it to be anywhere near this good so we'll see where it ends up. And it's really fun throwing crazy amount of tokens at the wall for ~free instead of watching the subscription limits tick closer while your agents churn away.
> 1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead.
Losing most of your customers tends to sharpen the mind a bit. They could eg stop pushing out the absolute frontier for a while and focus on making what they have run cheaper. Or they go and do more lobbying against China. Or a million other little things that take more than 30 seconds to come up with when writing a HN comment, but less than a week for someone who's smart and paid to do this for a living.
I did a lot of that kind of work with the older version of DeepSeek before they upped the prices.
For example, it was quite good to get a decent Sashiko review. Sashiko is a Linux kernel review agent with interchangeable LLM driver. It's very good, but it eats tokens like crazy.
That's 1/3 of GPT 5.6 Luna. It seems rather close to me.
But great that we have a new leader in performance/price in that segment.
Yep. 4.1 Flash is good enough for most routine coding things, but it also makes up for a lot of weakness by being so fast (and cheap of course).
I'm willing to tolerate babysitting things a lot more if I know I'll get almost instant results.
You could also have eg Sol do the babysitting.