This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The lower prices could be aimed at undercutting the competition.
Mobster voice: Sure would be a pity if the monetization potential of those 2 huge IPOs (3 if you count SpaceX with xAI deadweight rolled in) went boom when that's all that's holding your economy out of recession (depression depending on how they cook the books).
The way SpaceX IPO got crammed into index, it’s invulnerable to anything but an immediate incarceration of everybody involved.
Index funds will be required to buy the stocks at a listing price before market can decide how much they are worth exactly.
Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.
Yep this will be the fourth or fifth record breaking upward transfers of wealth I've lived through. I really don't want to live through another.
At this point many people won't. Hard to squeeze blood out of a dried, overworked, malnutritioned poisoned and diseased husk of a laid off worker.
Yeah, the whole plan is to have every US citizen's 401k's autobuy into the SpaceX IPO.
Your retirement fund is Elon's exit liquidity.
Its a truly fantastic fraud.
Because... the Nasdaq... well a few weeks ago it changed its rules on the delay time between an IPO and it being part of the index, the index that everyone's 401k's buy into.
I guess you could say its going to be 'epic' when this all blows up.
See this is basically how the us economy works:
Poors roll over negative equity into their next car loan.
The ever diminishing 'middle class' basically does the same with homes, helocs, etc.
The owners roll over debt via corporate amalgamations.
But because the rich have a magical legal barrier of 'all the bad and dumb things i do are a legal fiction doing them, not me personally', well, the legal fiction gets what its due and/or evaporates when it can't pay what it owes... and the rich remain on top.
Yeehaw!
Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.
Not at all wrong, but there's only so much blood parasites can suck before the host dies (and with luck kills the parasites, and / or sends a strong signal to everybody else to get their infestations eradicated, or at the very least under control), and that host is already hurting bad.
Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but a collapse of the likely magnitude could be that straw, or maybe it'll just be the back of US influence that breaks.
Prices are funny. My last job we were changing clients extra for doing a thing that didn’t cost us anything and was fast to do. How much we charged was completely arbitrary and depended on the partners mood. It’s all made up folks.
Yeah, which is why the "if minimum wage increases, so will prices" aregument is BS. They were going to charge the highest price they thought they could either way, the difference is that they are forced to increase the amount that goes to the people they are trying to pay the least.
This would impact the companies pnl though, so shareholders and c suite will get less money. That’s why they’re scaring people into not wanting to increase wage.
“Permanently” lol it’s a subscription and the terms say they can change the price at any time. How is it legal for them to advertise with the word “permanent”?
lol it’s a subscription
It's actually API access price, and it's charged per input + output tokens. $0.87 per million tokens is damn cheap.
They probably have super cheap electricity and it's possible they use cheap Chinese Ai chips for inference.
china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid
In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance
This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh
The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.
I think it's meant to convey that it's not a temporary deal on the old price, but a permanent new price point.
Permanent under the current pricing model, subject to change.
It would be hilarious if Chinese companies were the ones that punctured the investment bubble around AI in America.
Yes, almost like that's why there's a bubble despite the obvious disparity between both states' ability to maintain an adequate infrastructure for this technology. US companies are looting with the full expectation that the cost of the economic fallout will be shifted to taxpayers. They're getting as much value out of this before China inevitably becomes dominant even in the US sphere of influence as the US simply will never be able to compete after decades of neoliberal politics and the erosion of public works.
Still doesn't know what happened at Tiananmen Square, but can tell in detail how protests were brutally ended a few years later in South Africa...
It does, and it'll tell you about it. But it's their interface that censores the output, and it's not perfect. Ask it in English or Chinese and it'll censor it. But ask in Spanish or other languages and it doesn't get caught.
Okay I still won't use it.
Its safety rails are far worse than any in the West. But to your point, fuck AI.
There are plenty of rails, they’re just different ones. Like criticizing dear leader or Tiananmen square.
All about energy, and energy cost plays a role here, DeepSeek can go cheaper than western models...
All numbers in AI are made up it's wild to see tankies glaze DeepSeek's fake numbers while being skeptical of Western corporations' numbers
Not glazing when its simply enjoying watching China beat the US at its own game
All that and it still won’t talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre
but it will absolutely learn a lot about everyone who wanted to talk about it
DeepSeek never said it was permanent in their pricing materials, the article writer did. They are just taking the current expiration date off an existing discount. It's absolutely a shot across the bow at Claude, OpenAI, et al., but the author was click-baiting, as is tradition.
No?
The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.
Are they eating the cost? How are they able to do it while others are unable to?
They invented a hybrid attention design that drastically reduces the amount of memory needed for the KV cache at inference time. Like, dividing it by 10. And memory is a large part of the cost of inference.
This is a main part of the reason, yes. They actually innovated and did something that pushed the technology forward to be much more efficient, which we first saw with DeepSeek R1 for different reasons.
The American models are eating their cost big time, in return they get user data to train on and a massive reality distortion field that can theoretically be exploited later. It costs less for DeepSeek to eat their cost, and maybe the value of that user data is worth it now? Maybe there is some Chinese VC getting involved to try and boost DeepSeek with a little reality distortion field they can attempt to exploit later? I don't know, but all these seem plausible to me.
I'm unfamiliar with AI chatbots that you pay for. What is a token?
A token is basically just a word. Know how your phone’s auto suggest tries to anticipate the words you want to use as you type? In this case, your phone is using an extremely small token amount (typically only the previous two or three words you have typed) to try and predict your next word, which would also be a token. Your phone only uses a few tokens at a time, because as token count rises, processing requirements also quickly balloon.
And AI chat is basically the same concept, but with a massively inflated token limit. Instead of looking at your previous two or three words, it looks at entire conversations. And it also uses tokens to generate responses, the same way your phone is using one token at a time to predict your next word.
So when you pay for tokens, you’re essentially paying for a word count. As you continue a conversation, the token requirement for each subsequent request will increase, because it is attempting to look at the entire context of the conversation you have had.
Models have built-in token limits, to put a cap on how much memory is required to run the model. As conversations stretch on and you reach the model’s token limits, it will begin losing context for things that happened earlier. It will try to summarize earlier parts of the conversation to shorten them but keep relevant pieces in memory, or it will just outright drop old parts of the conversation and “forget” that context, the same way my phone has already forgotten the start of this sentence.
It’s a little more complicated that “each word is a token”, because the chatbot will combine your prompts with its own internal systems. Especially as conversations stretch on, and it begins to summarize old parts to keep them in memory. But that’s the most straightforward way to explain it.
My understanding is that tokens are basically words, and that when you ask a question it charges for all the tokens it consumes, produces, or processes. There's a lot of internal processing for each request, where the input text is summarized in different ways and combined with previous parts of the conversation, so it's not as straightforward as "word count of what you say plus what it says".
Worth noting that a token is not necessarily a word, though can be. One word could also take multiple tokens. It can also vary from LLM to LLM and their tokenization methods.
Thank you daddy Xi
