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>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

>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 ago
That makes no sense....OpenRouter didn't create Deepseek
- NortySpock 5mo ago
  I 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago
  Deepseek 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.

zuzululu 5mo ago

That makes no sense....OpenRouter didn't create Deepseek

NortySpock 5mo ago
I 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 ago

Sure, 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 ago
Deepseek 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.