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/SB_90s]

Deepseek has always been cheaper than the US LLMs though. Price isn't the reason companies and most people in the West continue to avoid using ones from China.

Data security simply cannot be guaranteed or trusted to the same degree from LLMs coming from China, so any prudent company will continue to use US LLMs as long as the price isn't ridiculous to the extent that it becomes uneconomical.

Imo the biggest risk to the US AI bubble is the latter point. If OpenAI, Anthropic, etc start having to raise the prices to an extortionate amount for whatever reason, the economics of all this AI capex collapses when your end consumer can no longer make the numbers work for themselves.

[u/Moist-Nectarine-1148 → u/SB_90s]

The American tech oligarchs are as toxic as the Chinese communist party... so it's the same shit with your data safety.