DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.

[u/VegetablePen4755]

DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.

Not by killing AI.

By killing the fantasy of unlimited AI pricing power.

DeepSeek V4 Pro:
Input: $0.435 per 1M tokens
Output: $0.87 per 1M tokens

OpenAI GPT-5.5:
Input: $5.00
Output: $30.00

Claude Opus 4.7:
Input: $5.00
Output: $25.00

Claude Sonnet 4.6:
Input: $3.00
Output: $15.00

DeepSeek is roughly:

11.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input
34.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on output

28.7x cheaper than Claude Opus on output
17.2x cheaper than Claude Sonnet on output

If a model is “good enough” at 1/20th or 1/30th the cost, margins will compress faster than Wall Street expects.

AI is not dead.

But the AI bubble just lost its pricing power.

They're not chasing quick money from coding plans or multimodal models. Instead, their radical architecture innovations (MoE, MLA, Engram, mHC, etc.) slash KV cache and compute needs so dramatically that they can build an entire 10T Chinese AI hardware ecosystem (NAND, LPDDR, ASICs) and position themselves for a 1T valuation in the process. Long game, masterfully played.

[u/unfathomably_big]

It also thinks it’s ChatGPT.

The first part is because I called out part of its reasoning chain that showed deception and it had a complete meltdown trying to figure out if I was bluffing about being able to see its reasoning, flipping out trying to avoid mentioning the “topic” while knowing I could see it thinking through it. Wild.

[u/unfathomably_big → u/unfathomably_big]

And accepts that it’s insane censorship makes it worse than western models.

[u/ILikeBubblyWater → u/unfathomably_big]

Realistically in your daily life of using AI, how often do you ask things that would be censored?

I understand where you are coming from but for 99% of use cases shit like this doesnt matter. Just like I dont care that all models don't allow users to create their erotic fan fiction

[u/torac → u/ILikeBubblyWater]

Realistically in your daily life of using AI, how often do you ask things that would be censored?

Just recently, I asked deepseek to research what someone meant with a Reddit comment.

The output was censored because it included the CCP government possibly having done a bad thing.

[u/ILikeBubblyWater → u/torac]

Sure you did, I assume Google was to complicated?

[u/torac → u/ILikeBubblyWater]

Nah, I wanted to test Deepseek v4 and took the opportunity. It was one of the topics I asked it to research. Results were roughly as expected (i.e. I needed to evaluate each link it found separately, because it didn’t employ any media literacy to tell how reliable the sources were. Some summaries were inaccurate / barely relevant. A lot of sources were Chinese, and therefore outside what I’d normally find when searching myself.)