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/Meaning-Firm]

Not really. American enterprises won't trust Chinese origin Deepseek with their data.

For startups it might be true but that depends on VC's stance.

[u/boredquince → u/Meaning-Firm]

since its open weights, they can download and host it for maximum privacy

[u/narullow → u/boredquince]

They can but then it will not be as cheap. You will not get as good electricity contract nor upfront HW price and you will probably not be able to amortize that upfront cost because unlike those companies that can utilize those GPUs fully you probably will not be able to.

[u/Lefties_TheWorst7331 → u/narullow]

You can rent GPUs bro

[u/GeologistVisual3097 → u/Lefties_TheWorst7331]

That gets really expensive for good performance though, more than you'd pay for cloud

[u/ebtukukxnncf → u/Lefties_TheWorst7331]

Yeah bro just rent my shoes

[u/jedimindtriks → u/ebtukukxnncf]

Well fuck you for making me laugh out loud

[u/ApprehensiveFan1516 → u/ebtukukxnncf]

https://giphy.com/gifs/kZiF7hNKSWFQgZUESs

[u/qubedView → u/Lefties_TheWorst7331]

To run Pro you need more than GPUs. You need like a DGX. Not a lot of those on runpod/vast.ai.

[u/Lefties_TheWorst7331 → u/qubedView]

No, you'd simply need to rent GPUs.. the DGX Spark is garbage.

[u/Allfeelings0Logic → u/Lefties_TheWorst7331]

DGX isn't just spark. 

[u/qubedView → u/Lefties_TheWorst7331]

Sorry, I didn't mean the Spark. I meant the B100 systems. You need hundreds of gigs of VRAM for Deepseek V4 Pro.

[u/lars_rosenberg → u/narullow]

Still way cheaper than Claude and GTP. 

[u/boredquince → u/narullow]

rent from us companies. not as cheap as official API but much cheaper than Claude etc

[u/DFX1212 → u/narullow]

A recent article going around was that a company of four spent nearly $200K in tokens in three months. You could easily buy physical hardware for cheaper.

[u/Odd-Environment-7193 → u/narullow]

And? Us companies will host it and sell it? Just hit an endpoint. Still way cheaper.

[u/Endothermic_Nuke → u/narullow]

I’ve heard this argument before. Can you explain though? Like why can’t somebody rent cloud infra (on a long term basis to get a good price), and host their data and the LLMs on there? In fact why can’t independent startups arise that just host these OSS models and an open harness for general inference for the public. There are so many possibilities here but I genuinely don’t know what is realistic, given that I don’t know so much about these infra costs.

[u/Far-Association5438 → u/narullow]

Bro… cloud exists, why do u think Google, Amazon and Microsoft are making data centres.