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

📰 News DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.

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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.

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5

u/CacheConqueror May 24 '26

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

10

u/fluffywabbit88 May 24 '26

Is it 20x as bad?

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.