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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 d

by 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allegations) And it's not even something I just made up, the law explicitly says it: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."[0] [0]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.
  - qeternity 2y ago
    > I still believe Sonnet is better, but I don't think it is 10 times better. Sonnet doesn't need to be 10 times better. It just needs to be better enough such that the downstream task improves more than the additional cost. This is a much more reasonable hurdle. If you're able to improve the downstream performance of something that costs $500k/year by 1% then the additional cost of Sonnet just has to be less than $5k/year for there to be positive ROI. I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. And the VC funded frontier labs may be screwed. But I don't think R1 is terminal for them. It's still a very competitive field.
    - sdesol 2y ago
      > But I don't think R1 is terminal for them. I hope not, as I we need more competition.
- 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.

by sdesol 2y ago

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.
- qeternity 2y ago
  > I still believe Sonnet is better, but I don't think it is 10 times better. Sonnet doesn't need to be 10 times better. It just needs to be better enough such that the downstream task improves more than the additional cost. This is a much more reasonable hurdle. If you're able to improve the downstream performance of something that costs $500k/year by 1% then the additional cost of Sonnet just has to be less than $5k/year for there to be positive ROI. I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. And the VC funded frontier labs may be screwed. But I don't think R1 is terminal for them. It's still a very competitive field.
  - sdesol 2y ago
    > But I don't think R1 is terminal for them. I hope not, as I we need more competition.
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.