4 ms·
Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
by progval 2mo ago
Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.
- Hamuko 2mo agoNot that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
- cheesecakegood 2mo agoAlso 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.
- londons_explore 2mo ago> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally. That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...
- qup 2mo agoOr who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai
- dud3333 2mo agocouldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP? Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?
- constantius 2mo agoPresumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.
- martinald 2mo agoWhy would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.
- vincnetas 2mo agonon public companies also have stocks.
- kortilla 2mo agoThe two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.
- culi 2mo agoThe stock market seems much more likely to benefit from access to cheap and self-hostable models than it is to suffer from OpenAI/Anthropic losing to competition
- RobotToaster 2mo agoWouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing? I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?
- skeledrew 2mo agoTheoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.
- kaon_2 2mo agoYes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing. Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely. Yeah it's dumb.
- landl0rd 2mo agoAs much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.
- fryanyway_swe 2mo agoNot really. Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?
- Footprint0521 2mo agoYeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense
- notfromhere 2mo agoI have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.
- r00t- 2mo agoThat's a bit obvious, isn't it?
- thecopy 2mo agoPeak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before. EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices
- jLaForest 2mo ago~200% increase is marginal to you?
- nchmy 2mo ago200% increase over practically free is still practically free
- mcbuilder 2mo agoIt mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them. Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoIt seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas. You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.
- odo1242 2mo agoThere's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.
- farlight 2mo agoThank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world. As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive. Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate. The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoMakes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.
- eli 2mo agoThey did release the weights and there are many providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid... Deepseek's official API has a pretty bad privacy policy so I would assume businesses avoid them in any event
- ljlolel 2mo agoit says they actively train on your data
- eli 2mo agoYes - unusually (uniquely?) bad for an official API. Which is a real bummer because it’s otherwise solid with excellent caching.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoMy feelings are kind of split about it. On one hand, yes, I don't like it when a company essentially go through my history, train with it, and try to earn more profits for themselves based on what I've "unwillingly contributed". But then on the other hand, I also know that DeepSeek will release the weights they train (and publish new architecture upgrades) so me and others can download them and run them ourselves, as well as they'll earn more profits based on it. Then it's no longer so black and white for me, and I kind of feel like I'm not so bothered by it as when Anthropic and others do it. I'd still prefer it wasn't like that, but I guess it's a compromise ultimately, at least I'll be able to run it myself.
- nhecker 2mo ago
- vrc 2mo agoIt wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.
- fryanyway_swe 2mo ago[flagged]
- andai 2mo agoYeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoThat's one way of interpreting supply and demand curves, I guess :/
- sinuhe69 2mo agoNot just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.
- culi 2mo agoMakes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones
- declan_roberts 2mo agoNot sure they even have a choice.
- nhuser2221 2mo agoYep they don’t have a choice
- aucisson_masque 2mo agoThat is not at all the case. The Chinese government is even indirectly subsidizing Claude and other platforms like ChatGPT. If you buy Claude api access through a third party Chinese company, it's cheaper than when you buy directly. Beside it would go against the Chinese philosophy of just using the right tool for the job. If Claude is better at a task than deepseek, they sure use Claude. No really I don't get your claim, do you have any proof that you can source ??
- culi 2mo agoAsia isn't just China. India has a larger population than China. Anthropic doesn't allow Claude in China and neither does OpenAI. But the rest of Asia certainly has a choice. Unless you mean socioeconomically. Also there's plenty of loopholes people in China can use to still access those models
- ganondev 2mo agoThis is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.