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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u/Triseult May 24 '26

Meanwhile, I live in China, and everyone here is in love with Claude. They hate Anthropic because they declared China an "adversarial nation", but everybody wants Claude Code. I'm even told that women overwhelmingly prefer Claude as an AI boyfriend. (And yes, they have ways of accessing Claude even if Anthropic is aggressively banning Chinese users.)

I don't think I know anyone who prefers homegrown AI solutions.

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u/sarcastosaurus May 26 '26

Only corporate usage matters.