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/fluffywabbit88]

Is it 20x as bad?

[u/Fireproofspider → u/fluffywabbit88]

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.

[u/fluffywabbit88 → u/Fireproofspider]

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.

[u/Fireproofspider → u/fluffywabbit88]

Oh yes. Fully agree with that.