All about energy, and energy cost plays a role here, DeepSeek can go cheaper than western models...
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
369 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
84891 readers
3619 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
No wonder. Since deepseek has open license, they have to compete with 3rd party providers, and in case of smallest models with local generation.
“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.
I think it's meant to convey that it's not a temporary deal on the old price, but a permanent new price point.
What is the effective difference? It’s not like they’re offering long term contracts.
60% of the time it works every time
Don’t use any of them much and from my limited experience they all seem to be pretty much the same. In fact DeepSeek probably has been a little better than ChatGPT.
As long as you don't mind them harvesting every tiny bit of data you feed it.
I don't like the big US players, but at least they're doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit. Deepseek is not pretending at all. I suppose it's at least honest and the price point is REALLY tempting. Openclaw gets expensive fast with the number of tokens it consumes. I burned through $30 in two days with it using Claude Haiku/Sonnet. Plugging it into cheap LLM is a nice idea, but no thanks.
Permanent under the current pricing model, subject to change.
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.
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.
It's not BS, it's just not as direct of an impact as they are implying. If payroll is 10% of their expenses (assuming EVERYONE makes minimum wage) then doubling the minimum wage will increase costs by 10%.
Which could be (partially) absorbed from profits, could cause a 10% price hike... or a 50% price hike and fat bonuses for the executives.
it’s a reminder that capitalists put profit over literally everything else. your cost. your wage. everything.
It could also affect the cost of any other inputs that are labour-heavy.
There is an element of minimum wage increasing, increasing prices because now there are more people that can afford to pay for things.
But yes it isn't because costs go up, and it really only applies to things people on minimum wage can afford and it's always less than the increase in wages.
This would impact the companies pnl though, so shareholders and c suite will get less money. That’s why they’re scaring people into not wanting to increase wage.
The hilarious irony is that is not even conclusive. There are plenty of studies, both real-world and contrived, that indicate that employers paying more, in broad, yields returns in excess of the added payroll costs.
Not only are there more customers, but increasing pay increases the quality and quantity of labor output.
The lower prices could be aimed at undercutting the competition.
Mobster voice: Sure would be a pity if the monetization potential of those 2 huge IPOs (3 if you count SpaceX with xAI deadweight rolled in) went boom when that's all that's holding your economy out of recession (depression depending on how they cook the books).
The way SpaceX IPO got crammed into index, it’s invulnerable to anything but an immediate incarceration of everybody involved.
Index funds will be required to buy the stocks at a listing price before market can decide how much they are worth exactly.
Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.
Yeah, the whole plan is to have every US citizen's 401k's autobuy into the SpaceX IPO.
Your retirement fund is Elon's exit liquidity.
Its a truly fantastic fraud.
Because... the Nasdaq... well a few weeks ago it changed its rules on the delay time between an IPO and it being part of the index, the index that everyone's 401k's buy into.
I guess you could say its going to be 'epic' when this all blows up.
See this is basically how the us economy works:
Poors roll over negative equity into their next car loan.
The ever diminishing 'middle class' basically does the same with homes, helocs, etc.
The owners roll over debt via corporate amalgamations.
But because the rich have a magical legal barrier of 'all the bad and dumb things i do are a legal fiction doing them, not me personally', well, the legal fiction gets what its due and/or evaporates when it can't pay what it owes... and the rich remain on top.
Yeehaw!
load more comments
(11 replies)
All numbers in AI are made up it's wild to see tankies glaze DeepSeek's fake numbers while being skeptical of Western corporations' numbers
All I see is good and cheap model. It doesn't even have to be perfect, just in ballpark of mainstream models.
Them cutting consumer prices doesn't show that though.
It's wild that people normally critical of AI boosting will drink Koolaid if it's China flavored
Not glazing when its simply enjoying watching China beat the US at its own game
load more comments
(6 replies)
“permanently” means nothing when it comes to technology
view more: next ›