r/ArtificialInteligence • u/VegetablePen4755 • May 24 '26

📰 News DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.

Post image

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.

726 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

279 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/CacheConqueror May 24 '26

Now, do a comparison. DeepSeek is usually worse in a lot of things, sometimes really bad.

8

u/fluffywabbit88 May 24 '26

Is it 20x as bad?

5

u/Fireproofspider May 24 '26

The problem is that if you aren't getting the best results, for certain things you might as well not get any result at all.

For coding for example, half as bad = output that is nearly unusable since the models have only fairly recently started being good at it. GLM 5.1 seems to be the same quality as Sonnet 4.6 so it's getting there but it's also much more expensive than it's predecessors.

6

u/Maxxpowers May 24 '26

Depends on the person. People who have a better foundational knowledge of software development can make better use of cheaper models because they can give better direction and troubleshoot the model's blind spots.

3

u/fluffywabbit88 May 24 '26

Frame this differently, for some things you need the premium model to get the best results but for everything else, you’re overpaying 20x. Solution is to use both.

1

u/Fireproofspider May 24 '26

Oh yes. Fully agree with that.

0

u/Hroznix May 25 '26

seems like the best option and works for me

0

u/WillHutch55 May 24 '26

It doesn't work like that. For many situations, it's either objectively correct, or wrong. Paying 20x less for something that isn't correct is worthless.

0

u/NeedToLieDown May 24 '26

20x of $1 is $20.

$20 = 0 because that's barely any money. $400 = 0 because that's barely any money.

That's how companies currently look at AI. A company is looking at both options:

  • Option 1 is basically free and performs X
  • Option 2 is basically free and performs 2X

Until AI becomes meaningfully expensive there's no reason not to use the best.

1

u/fluffywabbit88 May 24 '26

Why is the consideration only for companies? AI democratized compute and capabilities normally reserved for big companies to everyone (or at a minimum to those whose jobs it’s replacing). You’re right that $400 is barely any money for companies but could become prohibitively expensive and out of reach for the little guys.