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DeepSeek V3 came in the perfect time, precisely when Claude Sonnet turned into crap and barely allows me to complete something without me hitting some unexpecte

DeepSeek V3 came in the perfect time, precisely when Claude Sonnet turned into crap and barely allows me to complete something without me hitting some unexpected constraints. Idk, what their plans is and if their strategy is to undercut the competitors but for me, this is a huge benefit. I received 10$ free credits and have been using Deepseeks api a lot, yet, I have barely burned a single dollar, their pricing are this cheap! I’ve fully switched to DeepSeek on Aider & Cursor (Windsurf doesn’t allow me to switch provider), and those can really consume tokens sometimes. We live in exciting times.

sdesol 2y ago
Prices will increase by five times in February, but it will still be extremely cheap compared to Sonnet. $15/million vs $1.10/million for output is a world of difference. There is no reason to stop using Sonnet, but I will probably only use it when DeepSeek goes into a tailspin or I need extra confidence in the responses.
- nico 2y ago
  Could this trend bankrupt most incumbent LLM companies? They’ve invested billions on their models and infrastructure, which they need to recover through revenue If new exponentially cheaper models/services come out fast enough, the incumbent might not be able to recover their investments
  - sdesol 2y ago
    I literally cannot see how OpenAI and Anthropic can justify their valuation given DeepSeek. In business, if you can provide twice the value at half the price, you will destroy the incumbent. Right now, DeepSeek is destroying on price and provides somewhat equivalent value compared to Sonnet. I still believe Sonnet is better, but I don't think it is 10 times better. Something else that DeepSeek can do, which I am not saying they are/will, is they could train on questionable material like stolen source code and other things that would land you in deep shit in other countries. DeepSeek just needs to improve the value and I can see them destroying Anthropic since I believe coding is their main focus. When it comes to text processing, I personally find GPT to be much better and that might also have to do with allegations that they trained on literature that they should not have.
    - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
      > Something else that DeepSeek can do, which I am not saying they are/will, is they could train on questionable material like stolen source code and other things that would land you in deep shit in other countries. I don't think that's true. There's no scenario where training on the entire public internet is deemed fair use but training on leaked private code is not, because both are ultimately the same thing (copyright infringement allegations) And it's not even something I just made up, the law explicitly says it: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."[0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
      - XorNot 2y ago
        It's a Chinese service hosted in China. They absolutely do not care, and on this front the CCP will definitely back them up.
        j-a-a-p 2y ago
        Nonsense - there is already a decade plus of litigation on copyright and sorts with China. The days you could find carbon copied designs in China are of the past.
    - laluser 2y ago
      Why? Just look at the last year for how cheap inference and almost all models have gone down in price. OpenAI has 100s of millions of daily active users, with huge revenues. They already know there will be big jumps like this as there have in the past and they happen quickly. If anything, this is great for them, they can offer a better product with less quotas as they are severely compute bottlenecked. It's a win-win situation for them.
      - sdesol 2y ago
        > OpenAI has 100s of millions of daily active users, with huge revenues. My rational is we are dealing with a commodity product. People will go where the best answer is. I only use DeepSeek because it is good. If it was free, but sucked, I would not use it. Honestly, I do hope they (OpenAI) offer a better product but as it currently stands, I will not use their models because they don't offer enough value for the price.
  - audunw 2y ago
    It’s the infrastructure and the expertise in training models that have been to purpose of the investments. These companies know full well that the models themselves are nearly worthless in the long term. They’ve said so explicitly that the models are not a moat. All they can do is make sure they have the compute and the engineers to continue to stay at or near the state of the art, while building up a customer base and integrations that add value on top of the model itself. It doesn’t help if you have a cheap model if you don’t have the infrastructure to run it at a large scale, and the integrations that help pull in regular mass market consumers. The other companies will just copy, and possibly surpass the breakthrough in efficiency. And now they’ve got an efficient model AND the infrastructure and expertise to deploy it at a huge scale very rapidly. This month it’s Deepseek that’s ahead. Next month it will be someone else. Haven’t we learned that by now?
    - maxglute 2y ago
      >models themselves are nearly worthless It makes all the difference when they also know 90% of their capex is worthless. Obviously hyperbole, but grossly over valued for what was originally scaled. And with compute infra depreciating 3-5 years, it doesn't matter whose ahead next month, if what they're actually ahead in is massive massive debt due to loss making infra outlays that will never return on capita because their leading model now can only recoop a fraction of that after open source competitors drove prices down for majority of good enough use cases. The lesson one should learn is economics 101 still applies. If you borrow billions on a moat, and 100s of billions on a wall, but competitors invent a canon, then you're still potentially very dead, just also very indebt while doing so.
govideo 2y ago
Can you tell me more about how Claude Sonnet went bad for you? I've been using the free version pretty happily, and felt I was about to upgrade to paid any day now (well, at least before the new DeepSeek).
- misiti3780 2y ago
  I use the paid verison, it I'm pretty happy with it. It's a lot better than OpenAi products
- rfoo 2y ago
  It's not their model being bad, it's claude.ai having pretty low quota for even paid users. It looks like Anthropic doesn't have enough GPUs. It's not only claude.ai, they recently pushed back increasing API demand from Cursor too.
  - govideo 2y ago
    Interesting insight/possibility. I did see some capacity glitches with my Cursor recently. Overall, I like Anthropic (and ChatGPT); hopefully they continue to succeed.
- extr 2y ago
  I've been a paid Claude user almost since they offered it. IMO it works perfectly well still - I think people are getting into trouble running extremely long conversations and blowing their usage limit (which is not very clearly explained). With Claude Desktop it's always good practice to summarize and restart the conversation often.
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  I should’ve maybe been more explicit, it’s Claudes service that I think sucks atm, not their model. It feels like the free quota has been lowered much more than previously, and I have been using it since it was available to EU. I can’t count how many times I’ve started a conversation and after a couple of messages I get ”unexpected constrain (yada yada)”. It is either that or I get a notification saying ”defaulting to Haiku because of high demand”. I don’t even have long conversations because I am aware of how longer conversations can use up the free quota faster, my strategy is to start a new conversation with a little context as soon as I’ve completed the task. I’ve had thoughts about paying for a subscription because how much I enjoy Sonnet 3.5, but it is too expensive for me and I don’t use it that much to pay 20$ monthly. My suspicion is that Claude has gotten very popular since the beginning of last year and now Anthropic have hit their maximum capacity. This is why I said DeepSeek came in like a savior, it performs close to Claude but for pennies, it’s amazing!
ilaksh 2y ago
Their real goal is collecting real world conversations (see their TOS).

sdesol 2y ago

Prices will increase by five times in February, but it will still be extremely cheap compared to Sonnet. $15/million vs $1.10/million for output is a world of difference. There is no reason to stop using Sonnet, but I will probably only use it when DeepSeek goes into a tailspin or I need extra confidence in the responses.

nico 2y ago
Could this trend bankrupt most incumbent LLM companies? They’ve invested billions on their models and infrastructure, which they need to recover through revenue If new exponentially cheaper models/services come out fast enough, the incumbent might not be able to recover their investments
- sdesol 2y ago
  I literally cannot see how OpenAI and Anthropic can justify their valuation given DeepSeek. In business, if you can provide twice the value at half the price, you will destroy the incumbent. Right now, DeepSeek is destroying on price and provides somewhat equivalent value compared to Sonnet. I still believe Sonnet is better, but I don't think it is 10 times better. Something else that DeepSeek can do, which I am not saying they are/will, is they could train on questionable material like stolen source code and other things that would land you in deep shit in other countries. DeepSeek just needs to improve the value and I can see them destroying Anthropic since I believe coding is their main focus. When it comes to text processing, I personally find GPT to be much better and that might also have to do with allegations that they trained on literature that they should not have.
  - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
    > Something else that DeepSeek can do, which I am not saying they are/will, is they could train on questionable material like stolen source code and other things that would land you in deep shit in other countries. I don't think that's true. There's no scenario where training on the entire public internet is deemed fair use but training on leaked private code is not, because both are ultimately the same thing (copyright infringement allegations) And it's not even something I just made up, the law explicitly says it: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."[0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
    - XorNot 2y ago
      It's a Chinese service hosted in China. They absolutely do not care, and on this front the CCP will definitely back them up.
      - j-a-a-p 2y ago
        Nonsense - there is already a decade plus of litigation on copyright and sorts with China. The days you could find carbon copied designs in China are of the past.
  - laluser 2y ago
    Why? Just look at the last year for how cheap inference and almost all models have gone down in price. OpenAI has 100s of millions of daily active users, with huge revenues. They already know there will be big jumps like this as there have in the past and they happen quickly. If anything, this is great for them, they can offer a better product with less quotas as they are severely compute bottlenecked. It's a win-win situation for them.
    - sdesol 2y ago
      > OpenAI has 100s of millions of daily active users, with huge revenues. My rational is we are dealing with a commodity product. People will go where the best answer is. I only use DeepSeek because it is good. If it was free, but sucked, I would not use it. Honestly, I do hope they (OpenAI) offer a better product but as it currently stands, I will not use their models because they don't offer enough value for the price.
- audunw 2y ago
  It’s the infrastructure and the expertise in training models that have been to purpose of the investments. These companies know full well that the models themselves are nearly worthless in the long term. They’ve said so explicitly that the models are not a moat. All they can do is make sure they have the compute and the engineers to continue to stay at or near the state of the art, while building up a customer base and integrations that add value on top of the model itself. It doesn’t help if you have a cheap model if you don’t have the infrastructure to run it at a large scale, and the integrations that help pull in regular mass market consumers. The other companies will just copy, and possibly surpass the breakthrough in efficiency. And now they’ve got an efficient model AND the infrastructure and expertise to deploy it at a huge scale very rapidly. This month it’s Deepseek that’s ahead. Next month it will be someone else. Haven’t we learned that by now?
  - maxglute 2y ago
    >models themselves are nearly worthless It makes all the difference when they also know 90% of their capex is worthless. Obviously hyperbole, but grossly over valued for what was originally scaled. And with compute infra depreciating 3-5 years, it doesn't matter whose ahead next month, if what they're actually ahead in is massive massive debt due to loss making infra outlays that will never return on capita because their leading model now can only recoop a fraction of that after open source competitors drove prices down for majority of good enough use cases. The lesson one should learn is economics 101 still applies. If you borrow billions on a moat, and 100s of billions on a wall, but competitors invent a canon, then you're still potentially very dead, just also very indebt while doing so.

govideo 2y ago

Can you tell me more about how Claude Sonnet went bad for you? I've been using the free version pretty happily, and felt I was about to upgrade to paid any day now (well, at least before the new DeepSeek).

misiti3780 2y ago
I use the paid verison, it I'm pretty happy with it. It's a lot better than OpenAi products
rfoo 2y ago
It's not their model being bad, it's claude.ai having pretty low quota for even paid users. It looks like Anthropic doesn't have enough GPUs. It's not only claude.ai, they recently pushed back increasing API demand from Cursor too.
- govideo 2y ago
  Interesting insight/possibility. I did see some capacity glitches with my Cursor recently. Overall, I like Anthropic (and ChatGPT); hopefully they continue to succeed.
extr 2y ago
I've been a paid Claude user almost since they offered it. IMO it works perfectly well still - I think people are getting into trouble running extremely long conversations and blowing their usage limit (which is not very clearly explained). With Claude Desktop it's always good practice to summarize and restart the conversation often.
Alifatisk 2y ago
I should’ve maybe been more explicit, it’s Claudes service that I think sucks atm, not their model. It feels like the free quota has been lowered much more than previously, and I have been using it since it was available to EU. I can’t count how many times I’ve started a conversation and after a couple of messages I get ”unexpected constrain (yada yada)”. It is either that or I get a notification saying ”defaulting to Haiku because of high demand”. I don’t even have long conversations because I am aware of how longer conversations can use up the free quota faster, my strategy is to start a new conversation with a little context as soon as I’ve completed the task. I’ve had thoughts about paying for a subscription because how much I enjoy Sonnet 3.5, but it is too expensive for me and I don’t use it that much to pay 20$ monthly. My suspicion is that Claude has gotten very popular since the beginning of last year and now Anthropic have hit their maximum capacity. This is why I said DeepSeek came in like a savior, it performs close to Claude but for pennies, it’s amazing!

ilaksh 2y ago

Their real goal is collecting real world conversations (see their TOS).