Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency. It runs entirely on Huawei chips. In other words, Chinese ecosystem has delivered a complete AI stack. Like it or not, that's a big news. But what's there not to like when monopolies break down?
The US-China contest aside - it is in the application layer llms will show their value. There the field, with llm commoditization and no clear monopolies, is wide open.
There was a point in time where it looked like llms would the domain of a single well guarded monopoly - that would have been a very dark world. Luckily we are not there now and there is plenty of grounds for optimism.
When someone points out hypocrisy, this is "the answer", it seems. But it is just a statement, not a rebuttal of the hypocrisy that was pointed out.
Hypocrisy is still hypocrisy.
And bad things are bad things. Yet no amount of propaganda (red scare, "eew dictatorship", Uyger-genocide, Taiwan threat) can convince me that the China is as evil (or more evil) than the US-Israel alliance of the the last 50 years.
It's a small difference, but important. Especially because that person is far more likely to be responsible (voting) for and profiting from USAs bad stuff.
Of course not. When it comes to SOTA LLMs you have the choice between two bad options. For many, choosing the Chinese option is just choosing the lesser of two evils (and it's much cheaper).
Mistral is right here, their models are in-between the cheap to run Chinese models and top of the line performances of US frontier models.
Mistral is good for many tasks where you do not need SOTA or near SOTA performance. They cannot compete if you do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7W20hdgWXY
I think I'll take the open AI models, innovative high quality EVs and cheap solar panels, please.
The reality is that the term democracy in western society has essentially become meaningless due to the swathes of algorithmic manipulation which occurs every second of everyday through every possible digital medium.
The current president - who Americans voted for twice - is heavily accused of being a pedophile and has reneged on every one of his poll promise
Really not the best advertisement for democracy
It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course they'll later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.
Right.
Neither is the US, land of slaves, segregation, and the KKK. They did seem to get better there for a few of decades, but sure are working hard to return to their roots.
Isn't the US building mass detention camps right now for all the brown people there? And arresting / detaining / demanding papers from any and everyone? With federal agents killing civilians?
Don't get me wrong, China is also horrible here, they have their own camps.
But pretending the US is positive wrt human rights is a wild take in 2026.
No, it is not, but the freedom of speech protections the US has (that China doesn't) allow for such commentary.
And yes, they are-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_immigrant_detention_si...
Why would you think that?
> And arresting / detaining / demanding papers from any and everyone?
I have lots of friends from outside the U.S. that come regularly and don't find it onerous. Maybe it depends where you are coming from?
> With federal agents killing civilians?
OK, I agree that there are issues, and even very serious ones. Obviously, not on the level of China, but still serious issues. Nonetheless, what you see on left leaning media is not representative of what is happening on the ground throughout the U.S. Not even close.
IMO, the US is definitely positive wrt human rights. There are issues, but you can go to a No Kings protest, and live your life happily without issues, and it is hard to find another country that is nearly as forgiving. And it at least has people trying to spread concepts of individual liberty, vs most countries in Europe, almost all countries in Asia, and ALL Muslim countries, that are leaning to removing individual rights.
No? Its for illegal people, regardless of color. Just so happened that most illegals come from specific places
If you meant American citizen human rights, then you’re correct.
Not even that. ICE has already killed US citizens, they no longer prohibit segregation, trans people were banned from the military, and many more. All of those affect American citizens.
How about your pack up your arrogance and stop defining human rights for me and other 1.4 billion Chinese?
Ask around in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and countless more countries around the world.
They didn't even say that. They only said China playing is "better than leaving everything to the US alone."
The US was one of the first democracies in the world, and many countries followed suit. But the US hasn't kept up, and now the powers that be have exploited the weaknesses in the system. With arguably the biggest one being giving the president too much power (appointing supreme court justices, executive orders, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live in a country without a million cameras that automatically fine me for crossing the street illegally but I don't actually deceive myself in thinking my vote counts for much.
Are you talking about the US or China? https://deflock.org/
China at least banned the use of facial recognition in public spaces by their supreme court in 2021 (and then further strengthened the ban in 2024 and also got the PIPL).
If you're thinking of the "social credit" system please know that that's just an online meme. China's credit score system is not even nationalized and not nearly as invasive as the US's credit score system, which can sometimes determine whether or not someone is allowed to buy a house.
Besides their own credit score system, the other thing that sometimes gets labelled the "social credit system" was an attempt they had to track the behavior of business leaders and elected politicians. Basically anyone who holds social power but not the common person. This also never really took off and was not ever nationalized/centralized.
Agreed, but there again, the democracies have surveillance capitalism, it's not exactly like we're not being tracked.
Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.
At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.
Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.
> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.
For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.
China's policies and government aren't morally defensible and I do fear that they will become more aggressive in spreading their influence and policies onto other countries, but from an economic standpoint what they're doing is super effective. While the previous world power (the US) is stuck in infighting and going through cycles of fixing/undoing the previous administration's damages, instead of planning ahead.
It’s this sort of example (and not properly supporting Ukraine, and not agreeing how to collectively deal with migrants, and not agreeing how to coordinate defence, and myriad other examples) that highlights what a pointless mess the EU is. It’s not a unified block - it’s 27 self-interested entities squabbling and playing petty power games, while totally failing to plan for the future with vision.
The EU could/should have ensured that a European equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic could thrive, and had competitive frontier models already; instead, they’re years and countless billions behind.
Which is crazy given that ASML is European.
Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.
They sanctioned the hell out of Huawei and now Huawei is bigger than ever
America is just not able to digest the idea that another country can be as good, if not better, at innovation
its naive to think they would have stayed on a 'western' stack.
Most of the time 'losing' isn't making a bad choice its being put in a situation where you have no good choices.
China is not perfect but a bit of competition is healthy and needed
The next decade is going to look very different with America Alone.
With all that goes on it has changed. Recently I sat on a plane near some Americans discussing their holidays here, and I noticed I felt contempt. Sitting their with insane privilege as their government torches the world.
Individuals remain individuals, and one really ought not to be prejudice. However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all. In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised. In America the rise facism apparently doesnt matter to them.
My family in law seems to swing slightly republican. As a Dutchie, I could get some answers because I'm too naive not to talk about politics. So I got to probe a bit. What I simply found was that they'd say "I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing". Then I'd say "well in the Netherlands, I'd argue that while news outlets have their bias, you can trust them on basic factual reporting". She looked at me with a stare that I could only describe as "oh but honey, you're too young and naive to understand". To which I thought "you don't know the Netherlands. We're not perfect but we're nowhere near as deranged as what I'm seeing here".
I think that explains a lot of it for some people. The trust in the media, all media, is completely broken. Trump has how many fellonies now? Can't trust it. Kamala is doing what now? All talk. DOGE is fixing the government? I fucking hope so! But can't trust the damn news. Whether they do or don't, they are always burning money, god damn bureaucrats.
I feel that's the mindset that my family in law has.
This view gets echoed here on HN a lot. I find it very strange to be honest, because I tune in to CNN and I see lots of bias in the commentary and editorial, but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth. It seems to me that the real issue is people don't seem to distinguish between reporting and editorial content / commentary. Stop watching that garbage and actually consume the factual content and analysis. Yeah it's dry and boring but if that isn't enough for you then it just shows you never cared about facts in the first place.
My running hypothesis has been the trust breakdown arises from social-media overexposure driving lazy nihilism, which in turn gave free reign to a uniquely-corrupt class of politicians. But I'm not sure how to neutrally evaluate that.
The most famous examples are likely the tobacco industry spreading misinformation through self-funded studies and experts, and the fossil fuel industry doing the same to seed doubt about climate change. But of course we can think of countless examples of entire industries and individual large corporations pushing out misleading bullshit, threatening or outright killing journalists and activists to cover up their catastrophic fuckups and their chronic conscious excretion of negative externalities.
This has all of course been going on since the dawn of time, but to focus on the last century in the US, we've seen all sorts of corporations and coalitions of rich and powerful people push misinformation into nearly every sector of our society - universities, science, journalism, politics, etc. in order to undermine confidence in shared facts, corrupt people's ability to discern whether or not something is fundamentally true, and sow confusion so that they can continue to operate in perpetuity in this chaotic maelstrom of doubt.
Lots of capture of government towards these ends as well, we can look at the concomitant constant cuts to education in order to weaken people's understanding of the world and ability to think critically. The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine was probably a step change, and Trump represents the sharpest recent escalation of all this.
From day one, he's done everything he can to shred any collective notion of shared objective truth. Anything he doesn't like is fake news, and the idea that the media is lying, scientists are lying, experts are lying, and institutions are lying, he has spread so fucking successfully through society, to the point where Americans no longer have anything like a shared sense of reality.
It seems like we're being reduced to tribes who are organized primarily around faith in various charismatic individuals.
I think this is fundamentally the worst thing he's done, because it lays the foundation for virtually every other conceivable and inconceivable abuse. If people can't even agree on what is happening, we're fucked. People and institutions in power can do anything they want to whoever they want, because the public has lost their ability to even recognize the danger posed to them collectively and thus mount any resistance based on a shared sense of reality.
Social media has definitely famously accelerated aspects of this like the fragmentation and the spread/magnification of fringe worldviews through echo chambers, but I think it's just one (and maybe this is controversial, but I'd be willing to be generous enough to think the 20something year old creators were too stupid to conceive of these long term consequences at first, but who knows, maybe not) element in a much longer and more intentional, malicious war against the many for the benefit of the few.
I'm trans. this Administration does not like us. after Charlie Kirk's murder, things got legitimately scary. Musk was retweeting people who called us "deranged bioweapons" who needed to be "forcibly institutionalized." NSPM-7 is surveilling and infiltrating trans organizations. the Heritage Foundation proposed labeling us as "ideological extremists," in the same category as neo-Nazis. if I'm arrested, I'll go to a men's prison where I'll likely be given to a violent inmate as his cellmate to "pacify" him (V-coding.)
so yeah, I keep my head down. a lot of Jews kept their heads down in Germany in the '30s, you know? and just like then, it doesn't seem like other countries are too keen on taking us in as refugees. I hope that changes if things get bleak.
And you’re right, most Americans do not understand the privileges they have or give one single shit about democracy; it is just not a salient political issue. But eggs… don’t get me started on eggs.
I feel like the issue there is that alarm bells in of themselves solve nothing. I won't extend that argument to one of its obvious conclusions, but instead I will say that efforts to attack education and critical thinking skills all contribute to people being susceptible to their democracy being corrupted and robbed blind - so having an educated populace with a sense of integrity and respect of human rights would help!
This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.
Of course the core issue is that there's a two party system; while I'm sure that in a healthy democracy the current republican and democrat parties would be the bigger ones, they wouldn't have a majority.
This, for me, is the crux. Politics is treated like a team sport in the US, you pick your side and cheer them on no matter what. And team sports in America are even more bananas - you grow up supporting the Brooklyn Dodgers and a few years later they're 2.5k miles away with a new name. This seems a perfect example of what's happened / happening to the Republican Party - it's not the same party any more, but everyone who tied their entire personality to cheering for the red team is still cheering for it as it burns the country to the ground. I predict that inside ten years it will have also had the name change and probably be run out of Florida or somewhere.
This is not something to be proud of. You guys are giving yourself loaned freebies, retiring 5+ (!) years earlier than countries like BeNeLux and Germany, and are pretty much expecting the EU to eventually pick up the pieces which will drag us all down.
Edit: always lovely when HN downvotes truths :)
It just doesn't make sense to delay retirement while youth unemployment is such a big problem. We ALL should be fighting like France, in many aspects.
At some point France will be in too deep shit and will look to the EU to cover for them. We will all pay for that. And it is deeply unfair because other countries their citizens have accepted later retirement and more frugal benefits to keep their countries fiscally healthy.
France could cover the fiscal hole in other ways, but taxing corporations and wealth at a higher rate also consistently ends up being blocked. And each year the hole gets deeper.
Your theory doesn't actually match with reality, given that Macron's retirement reform was passed into law despite protests. As currently enacted, the age of retirement in France will progressively increase from 62 until reaching 64 in 2030.
Reform wasn't passed, it was forced via a technicality after riots made it politically unpalatable, and it has put France in a governing crisis ever since.
Also, retirement in North, West and Central EU is 67+, not 64. Greece is at 67 too, although begrudgingly.
Again, I'd be equally happy if France covers the fiscal hole some other way, but I am not going to cover for a country that is willingly becoming the sick man of Europe because they want to live comfortably on borrowed time. Which, by the way, is a literal repeat of Greece its crisis. Time is a flat circle indeed.
https://youtu.be/tMd7EfFsPIc (Video claims France is against them, but if they ever were they are not anymore)
- Control goes beyond politics
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
- No meaningful private sphere
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Seems like China is ticking all the boxes.
- Control goes beyond politics
state corporation monopoly, 党支部 in private sector, crackdowns on NGOs and charities.
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
Party led, mandarin speaking Han Chinese nationalism, blended with Little Pink's unquestionable support for Xi and the party.
- No meaningful private sphere
社区网格员
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
We saw mobilization Chinese social media, attacking celebrities who don't openly say anything the party wants them to say. Mobilization in real life is rare though, cos it had shown it can backfire.
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Do I really need to explain this?
Luckily laws still stand somewhat.
( And Trump ain't smart enough)
Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
Have a peek at the fredom indx and the press freedom index for China. Guess where they stand?
You know about the chinese internet firewall.
You can't trust any data from the CCP.
And please don't equate the aberration that is the Trump administration with "regular" US administrations (and this is coming from a non US person).
But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?
Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.
Ridiculous take.
(China wiped out the entire EU industry through a "quiet" trade war since like the last 15 years, and we're not really talking about that aren't we...)
The powers that be try to slow this down by banning imports outright (you can't for example import American chicken into Europe because of food safety laws), or high import taxes (Chinese EVs have a 50% import tax in Europe and the US to protect the local car manufacturers. Which is fair because the Chinese EV manufacturers are state-sponsored so their prices are unfair. Then again, western companies get billions in investor money to push the prices down).
EU/France has Mistral.
So again, stop referring to EU as a country, we are not, and it just annoys any Europeans as it comes of as "Americans who don't understand the world outside of the USA".
China’s governments actions are on a completely different level - for example:
“””
Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide.
“”” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/eas...
Yes Trump is clearly trying Totalitarianism in America, but it is orders of magnitude different from what is happening in China.
That should be at least comparable (if not worse) than what China is doing.
China is repressing the Uyghur and threatening Taiwan. I don't agree with these actions but is really "orders of magnitude" worse than the destruction the US facilitates in the Middle East?
With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
> With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
And what is Europe going to do about it?
Boycott ChatGPT and Claude? Ha.
by your logic gentrification of neighborhoods with different people moving in is genocide as well
Btw. remind me when last tiem China bombed school and killed 150+ school girls as your friend US?
Or as Brit I hope you are proud about all the killing your country participated in in illegal invasion to Iraq based on fake news about WMD.
So does this mean I can run this on AMD? And on a consumer 9000 series card?
Already do on EVs.
And in any case what does open source actually mean for an llm? It's not like you can look inside it to see what it's doing.
However there is so many factors involved beyond your control that it would not be a viable option compared to other possible security attacks.
If I had to place a hidden target it'd probably be around RNGs or publicly exposed services..
I don't mean that flippantly. These things are dumped in the wild, used on common (largely) open source execution chains. If you find a software exploit, it's going to affect your population too.
Wet exploits are a bit harder to track. I'd assume there are plenty of biases based on training material but who knows if these models have a MKUltra training programme integrated into them?
Spearphishing.
Building reliance and exploiting it, through state subsidies, dumping, and market manipulation.
Handicapping provision to the west for competitive advantage.
Of course there are risks.
Understandable.
> Summary: The U.S. is currently engaged in an active war aimed at dismantling the Iranian government and its military capabilities, but it distinguishes this from destroying the country or its people. However, the humanitarian impact—including civilian casualties from airstrikes and the domestic crackdown by Iranian security forces—has led many international observers to warn that the campaign risks long-term instability and "state collapse" rather than a simple transition of power.
It does do quite a bit better if you ask it about the genocide in Gaza, summarizing the case for it, and citing only token justifications from the guilty party.
As of April 2026, Gemini is... For very obvious reasons, highly biased towards cultural consensus. If your cultural consensus is strong on some really messed up things, that's the outcome that it's going to give you.
Irrespective of how close the outcomes are to the actual facts, those two things have a different quality, don't they?
Not as much a difference as you would wish, as mean of public discourse is very actively managed, to our collective detriment, by a very small group of powerful people, which often includes the government. It's the nature of mass media, and the incestuous relationship between power and reach.
They Thought They Were Free, and all that. By the time the 'mean of public discourse' centers on something incredibly stupid or awful, nobody can be arsed to figure out who planted that idea in our heads.
I have a collection of novel probability and statistics problems at the masters and PhD level with varying degrees of feasibility. My test suite involves running these problems through first (often with about 2-6 papers for context) and then requesting a rigorous proof as followup. Since the problems are pretty tough, there is no quantitative measure of performance here, I'm just judging based on how useful the output is toward outlining a solution that would hopefully become publishable.
Just prior to this model, Gemini led the pack, with GPT-5 as a close second. No other model came anywhere near these two (no, not even Claude). Gemini would sometimes have incredible insight for some of the harder problems (insightful guesses on relevant procedures are often most useful in research), but both of them tend to struggle with outlining a concrete proof in a single followup prompt. This DeepSeek V4 Pro with max thinking does remarkably well here. I'm not seeing the same level of insights in the first response as Gemini (closer to GPT-5), but it often gets much better in the followup, and the proofs can be _very_ impressive; nearly complete in several cases.
Given that both Gemini and DeepSeek also seem to lead on token performance, I'm guessing that might play a role in their capacity for these types of problems. It's probably more a matter of just how far they can get in a sensible computational budget.
Despite what the benchmarks seem to show, this feels like a huge step up for open-weight models. Bravo to the DeepSeek team!
Summary: Opus 4.6 forms the baseline all three are trying to beat. DeepSeek V4-Pro roughly matches it across the board, Kimi K2.6 edges it on agentic/coding benchmarks, and Opus 4.7 surpasses it on nearly everything except web search.
DeepSeek V4-Pro Max shines in competitive coding benchmarks. However, it trails both Opus models on software engineering. Kimi K2.6 is remarkably competitive as an open-weight model. Its main weakness is in pure reasoning (GPQA, HMMT) where it trails Opus.
Speculation: The DeepSeek team wanted to come out with a model that surpassed proprietary ones. However, OpenAI dropped 5.4 and 5.5 and Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and 4.7. So they chose to just release V4 and iterate on it.
Basis for speculation? (i) The original reported timeline for the model was February. (ii) Their Hugging Face model card starts with "We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series". (iii) V4 isn't multimodal yet (unlike the others) and their technical report states "We are also working on incorporating multimodal capabilities to our models."
Just ran a couple of them through GPT 5.5, but this is a single attempt, so take any of this with a grain of salt. I'm on the Plus tier with memory off so each chat should have no memory of any other attempt (same goes for other models too).
It seems to be getting more of the impressive insights that Gemini got and doing so much faster, but I'm having a really hard time getting it to spit out a proper lengthy proof in a single prompt, as it loves its "summaries". For the random matrix theory problems, it also doesn't seem to adhere to the notation used in the documents I give it, which is a bit weird. My general impression at the moment is that it is probably on par with Gemini for the important stuff, and both are a bit better than DeepSeek.
I can't stress how much better these three models are than everything else though (at least in my type of math problems). Claude can't get anything nontrivial on any of the problems within ten (!!) minutes of thinking, so I have to shut it off before I run into usage limits. I have colleagues who love using Claude for tiny lemmas and things, so your mileage may vary, but it seems pretty bad at the hard stuff. Kimi and GLM are so vague as to be useless.
- One problem on using quantum mechanics and C*-algebra techniques for non-Markovian stochastic processes. The interchange between the physics and probability languages often trips the models up, so pretty much everything tends to fail here.
- Three problems in random matrix theory and free probability; these require strong combinatorial skills and a good understanding of novel definitions, requiring multiple papers for context.
- One problem in saddle-point approximation; I've just recently put together a manuscript for this one with a masters student, so it isn't trivial either, but does not require as much insight.
- One problem pertaining to bounds on integral probability metrics for time-series modelling.
Happy to try to answer more specific questions if anyone has any, but yes, these are among my active research projects so there's only so much I can say.
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/thinking_mode
No BS, just a concise description of exactly what I need to write my own agent.
Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product. Chinese models are being optimizing to be built upon.
But so much investment in their platforms, not just their APIs?
Why? It sounds like the stupidest idea ever. Interchangeability = no lock-in = no moot.
Now that you’re winning, others start cloning your API to siphon your users.
Now that you’re losing, you start cloning the current winner, who is probably a clone of your clone.
Highly competitive markets tend to normalize, because lock-in is a cost you can’t charge and remain competitive. The customer holds power here, not the supplier.
Thats also why everyone is trying to build into the less competitive spaces, where they could potentially moat. Tooling, certs, specialized training data, etc
They are developing their moats with the platform tooling around it right now though. Look at Anthropic with Routines and OpenAI with Agents. Drop that capability in to a business with loose controls and suddenly you have a very sticky product with high switching costs. Meanwhile if you stick with purely the ‘chat’ use cases, even Cowork and scheduled tasks, you maintain portability.
Pretty cool, I think they're the first to guarantee determinism with the fixed seed or at the temperature 0. Google came close but never guaranteed it AFAIK. DeepSeek show their roots - it may not strictly be a SotA model, but there's a ton of low-level optimizations nobody else pays attention to.
"Limited by the capacity of high-end computational resources, the current throughput of the Pro model remains constrained. We expect its pricing to decrease significantly once the Ascend 950 has been deployed into production."
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/news/news260424#api-%E8%...
I’d like somebody to explain to me how the endless comments of "bleeding edge labs are subsidizing the inference at an insane rate" make sense in light of a humongous model like v4 pro being $4 per 1M. I’d bet even the subscriptions are profitable, much less the API prices.
edit: $1.74/M input $3.48/M output on OpenRouter
It is like car vs. kick scooter.
In 2023, the depreciation schedule for H100s was 2 years, but they are still oversubscribed and generating signficant income.
Coreweve has upped their depreciation for GPUs to 6 years(!) now, which seems more realistic.
https://www.silicondata.com/blog/h100-rental-price-over-time
And Microsoft are going the same route to moving Copilot Cowork over to a utilisation based billing model which is very unusual for their per seat products (I’m actually not sure I can ever remember that happening).
But seriously, it just stems from the fact some people want AI to go away. If you set your conclusion first, you can very easily derive any premise. AI must go away -> AI must be a bad business -> AI must be losing money.
Aka: everyone who uses Nvidia isn't selling at cost, because Nvidia is so expensive.
At some point (from the very beginning till ~2025Q4) Claude Code's usage limit was so generous that you can get roughly $10~20 (API-price-equivalent) worth of usage out of a $20/mo Pro plan each day (2 * 5h window) - and for good reason, because LLM agentic coding is extremely token-heavy, people simply wouldn't return to Claude Code for the second time if provided usage wasn't generous or every prompt costs you $1. And then Codex started trying to poach Claude Code users by offering even greater limits and constantly resetting everyone's limit in recent months. The API price would have to be 30x operating cost to make this not a subsidy. That would be an extraordinary claim.
eg:
Token prices are significantly subsidized and anyone that does any serious work with AI can tell you this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684887
(the claims don't make any sense, but they are widely held)
I think I understand the major reasons for this meme, but I find it really worrying; there were lots of incorrect ‘it’s a bubble’ conversations here in 2012-2015, but I don’t think they had the pervasive nature and “obvious” conclusion that a whole generation of engineering talent should just, you know, leave.
Meanwhile I am hearing rational economic modeling from the companies selling inference; Jensen, (a polished promoter, I grant you) says it really well — token value is increasing radically, in that new models -> better quality, and therefore revenues and utilization are increasing, and therefore contrary to the popular financial and techbro modeling of 2023, things like A100s still cost quite a lot whether hourly or to purchase. (!) Basically the economic value is so strong that it has actually radically extended the life of hardware.
I just hate to imagine like half of the world’s (or US’s) engineering talent quitting, spending ten years afraid, or wrongly convinced of some ‘inevitable’ market outcome. Feels like it will be bad for people’s personal lives, and bad for progress simultaneously.
I'm still playing with the new Qwen3.6 35B and impressed, now DeepSeek v4 drops; with both base and instruction-tuned weights? There goes my weekend :P
One answer - Chinese Communist Party. They are being subsidized by the state.
Edit: it seems "open source" was edited out of the parent comment.
no one is ever going to release their training data because it contains every copyrighted work in existence. everyone, even the hecking-wholesome safety-first Anthropic, is using copyrighted data without permission to train their models. there you go.
It is very much a valuable thing already, no need to taint it with wrong promise.
Though I disagree about being used if it was indeed open source: I might not do it inside my home lab today, but at least Qwen and DeepSeek would use and build on what eg. Facebook was doing with Llama, and they might be pushing the open weights model frontier forward faster.
They're both correct given how the terms are actually used. We just have to deduce what's meant from context.
There was a moment, around when Llama was first being released, when the semantics hadn't yet set. The nutter wing of the FOSS community, to my memory, put forward a hard-line and unworkable definition of open source and seemed to reject open weights, too. So the definition got punted to the closest thing at hand, which was open weights with limited (unfortunately, not no) use restrictions. At this point, it's a personal preference that's at most polite to respect if you know your audience has one.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-is-sued-by-authors...
The training scripts are in Megatron and vLLM.
1. Training data is the source. 2. Training is compilation/compression. 3. Weights are the compiled source akin to optimized assembly.
However it's an imperfect analogy on so many levels. Nitpick away.
For reference, the huawei Ascend 950 that this thing runs on is supposed to be roughly comparable to nVidia's H100 from 2022. In other words, things are hotting up in the GPU war!
Nvidia's forward PE ratio is only 20 for 2026. That's much lower than companies like Walmart and Costco. It's also growing nearly 100% YoY and has a $1 trillion backlog.
I think Nvidia is cheap.
That's a very strange comment. Why would anyone run a dense model on a low-end computer? A 8B model is only going to make sense if you have a dGPU. And a Qwen3.6 or Gemma4 MoE aren't going to be “beaten the hell out” for most tasks especially if you use tools.
Finally, over the lifetime of your computer, your ChatGPT subscription is going to cost more than the cost of your reference computer! So the real question should be whether you're better off with a $1000 computer and a ChatGPT subscription or with a $2000 computer (assuming a conservative lifetime of 4 years for the computer).
Biggest risk I see is Nvidia having delays / bad luck with R&D / meh generations for long enough to depress their growth projections; and then everything gets revalued.
Back in Nov 2025, Opus 4.5 (80.9%) was the first proprietary model to do so.
So it os hard to tell how much of a model gain is due to skill, and how much - overfitting.