4 ms·
I keep seeing this narrative involving Deepseek as an example of OSS LLMs but they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost and one can easily understand
by zuzululu 5mo ago
I keep seeing this narrative involving Deepseek as an example of OSS LLMs but they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost and one can easily understand why they are doing it if one is not lazy and think critically.
It's still far too costly and not effective to use Local AI that can match what the frontier models can offer, especially when the inference hardware is being heavily restricted due to geopolitical risks. Claims about local LLMs somehow putting these frontier companies a run for their money I find especially doubtful in the long run.
Tokens are getting expensive because they are beginning to corner the market and will use that advantage to limit hardware distribution within and beyond the borders.
It's more likely that some workflows will see more local LLMs but those will never be the ones that require frontier model level or beat the price that a lighter smaller version of frontier model will offer to capture that tail end
- sourcecodeplz 5mo agoDon't think so, from what i've heard deepseek isn't loosing money on inference.
- logicchains 5mo ago>they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost This is absolutely false, because other providers serving the Deepseek models on OpenRouter are also able to offer very low prices, and they don't have the money to subsidize anything.
- zuzululu 5mo agoThat makes no sense....OpenRouter didn't create Deepseek
- NortySpock 5mo agoI don't think your counterpart is arguing that OpenRouter created DeepSeek. Rather I suspect their argument is that there are 13 providers listed on OpenRouter for DeepSeek v4 Pro that are competing on price. (That's the default balancing algorithm in OpenRouter, roughly: weighted towards the lowest price and was available in the last 30 seconds) If any providers are able to turn able to sustainably turn a profit, OpenRouter allows them to compete in an open market to process your tokens (or anyone else's tokens). Thus anyone subsidizing tokens bears the brunt of the compute load and gains not much more than name recognition and tokens to train on, but since switching to a different provider is a matter of changing one setting in the config panel (and can be set to auto-switch based on price), switching costs are very low. Providers of open models via OpenRouter have almost zero ability to lock-in users. So this claim that all 13 providers are selling subsidized inference is... a tough claim to swallow. Maybe some of them are, but all of them? I assume at least some providers want to show profitablity, and are pricing their service accordingly. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/pricing https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/pricing https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection
- leonidasv 5mo agoSure, but they didn't spend on training the model. If DeepSeek is providing the model for the same price as third parties, then it's probably still losing money when you account for the training.
- throwa356262 5mo agoDeepseek bypasses CUDA and has a few other optimisation that neither llama.cpp or vLLM support. Furthermore, V4 pro was designed to run on 4 Huawei Ascend GPUs which are much cheaper than the nvidia setup others use, and deepseek probably also got some free hardware for their collab. Hence it is entirely possible their inference costs are significantly lower than other providers.
- throwa356262 5mo agoDo you have a source for your first claim? My impression is that deepseek designed v4 specifically for cheap inference and they are not loosing money even at 75% lower price.