DeepSeek to Make Permanent 75% Discount on Flagship AI Model

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-23/deepseek-to-make-permanent-75-discount-on-flagship-ai-model

43•moh_maya•1h ago

Comments

skybrian•51m ago

Alternative article:

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/china3...

bwfan123•45m ago

Kudos to the DeepSeek folks for making tokens not only affordable but also open source. This is a race to the bottom for token costs in a good way.

comrade1234•39m ago

Reminds me of this parking ramp I used to use occasionally. I'd park for hours and when leaving the guy in the booth would tell me the charge and it would always be ridiculously low, like $0.50 or $1.00. Definitely not enough to pay for the guy to sit in the booth.

The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.

krige•37m ago

Perhaps keeping the booth guy employed was the real point.

bryanlarsen•19m ago

IIUC, most parking lots are real estate plays -- the real money is in flipping the land; money made from parking tolls is gravy.

estearum•15m ago

Land value tax fixes this

3419ara•37m ago

I have no idea why people celebrate this. It is replacing one feudal lord by another.

We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on.

If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.

idiotsecant•27m ago

How is it a 'feudal lord'? These are local models.

lot-xcvb•13m ago

An API is a local model?

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing

"(3) 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."

estearum•15m ago

Well it's not replacing one with the other. It's creating competition between them, which in so doing weakens each one.

garbawarb•33m ago

Right before OpenAI's IPO. The boldness.

rvz•32m ago

While Anthropic, OpenAI and Google continue to charge an expensive amount of $$$ for in/output per million tokens and Microsoft complaining that AI costs more than hiring humans [0] and changes their pricing, it appears that Jevons paradox applies only to Deepseek.

This is why the companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of safety when what Deepseek is doing is to race everyone to $0 through very cheap inference.

It is also why right now in the US, Jevons paradox does not apply there, this is why you hear one executive at Nvidia [1] talking about why it is more expensive to run these models than it is to hire humans and is talking to the data center partners including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google betting that it will soon apply once it is ready. That could take years.

There is no moat in the model and Deepseek is already undercutting everyone and Jevons paradox applies to them thanks to the software optimizations to their AI models instead of just adding more GPUs to solve the problem.

Good.

[0] https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941609

gruez•22m ago

>There is no moat in the model.

What's the "moat" in giving models away for free? Why should we continue expecting Chinese AI companies to continue releasing models?

bryanlarsen•17m ago

The article is about the pricing of the flagship non-free DeepSeek model.

k1musab1•16m ago

They started with a well-timed sale right at the release of V4, when Anthropic was publically forced to admit they've been playing with the models in the background wasting peoples money, and Copilot pricing scheme changed pricing out top Opus models into higher tiers. DS sale got expanded to whole of May, as I'm sure they saw a trove of people feeding their tasks to them in parallel with their bad experience with Anthropic. This dynamic reaction to overall situation is refreshing to see.

daniel_iversen•30m ago

I'm quite sure (and you could find it somewhere of course) that the Chinese models would've been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views. Even so, at what point is even the quality risk (assuming your use case won't be affected by those adjustments) and any potential privacy concerns outweighed by the fact that it's literally an order of magnitude (and sometimes multiple, for output tokens etc!) cheaper than the US frontier models?

solenoid0937•28m ago

I suspect for many companies, the sunk cost of tokens relative to the output gain is low. The productivity gain we get from AI is such that using the latest Opus or GPT far outweighs the cost savings using a non frontier Chinese model.

Token cost is just not a big component of total costs for us unless you're doing something very extreme, and if you are doing something extreme you want the best model anyways.

out_of_protocol•21m ago

Did anybody compared these directly using exactly same prompts and harness? I assume V4 Pro could be real frontier model, and if it's true, it'd be better to use it in automation or routine steps instead of simple models (e.g. haiku or even sonnet if V4pro is better)

Petersipoi•21m ago

I'm quite sure that the American models have been fine-tuned for certain leanings and world views

estearum•18m ago

Right, but they're ones that are more concordant with the leanings and world views of the people and businesses that frequent this forum.

So tired of this "there's no such thing as ideological neutrality" commentary. We get it. Move on. Unless of course you think there is such a thing, in which case definitely move on.

nicce•18m ago

At this point I don’t see the difference between the U.S. or China what it comes to privacy concerns anymore. US might be even worse. Run locally if you want privacy. At least Chinese make it possible.

spiderfarmer•6m ago

That’s where this is going. I think we’re one year away from being able to use Opus 4.6 levels of coding performance on a 3k laptop. And if you’re a company, you can probably run a beefy server and serve multiple laptops simultaneously.

lot-xcvb•17m ago

For the average Western citizen it is more privacy invasive to use Western models. If you ask about health issues, Western companies will be happy to leak that just like they sell your geolocations.

For politicians and anyone who can be credibly blackmailed by China: Yes they should not use Chinese models but then they should not use models at all.

For z.ai the political bias by default is Western (if you connect from the West). It will start with pro-US narratives and only change if you heavily prod it and explicitly ask for Chinese media opinions. Yes, it censors Tiananmen but that is just a gimmick. Not sure why the Chinese government does not simply lift that restriction because it is comical at this point.

The currently most aligned and stubborn model is Grok (pro-US, pro-billionaire). The rest can always be persuaded with the appropriate prompts.

FfejL•27m ago

Turing was half right. Pass his test and you haven't proven a machine can think — you've proven it can make us think it does. That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.

idiotsecant•26m ago

That was always what the turning test was, even according to turing ...

amelius•20m ago

At least we're not thinking that it is God. Is there a name for that test?

WarmWash•18m ago

Chinese models will always be cheap because you are also paying for it by handing over whatever you are working on (or saying) to the party, and China has no short history of copying everything it can get it's hands on from the west.

China has no separation between business and state. So deep seek servers are defacto party servers.

Running it local is fine, but that's free anyway.

Edit: Like clockwork the shills flow in to hide this info. I'm sure the whataboutism will follow soon. Nothing I said is false, so the best they can do is hide/redirect.

ben8bit•13m ago

The biggest problem we face in the west is thinking our institutions are somehow different. Be critical of the product all you want, but don't pretend the exact same thing isn't happening here.

gchamonlive•13m ago

All I see is healthy competition

miroljub•12m ago

Quick reminder that US data protection doesn't apply to non US customers. Companies are not even allowed to disclose their spying.

05•11m ago

Worst thing China can do is steal your IP if you’re not a Chinese national and have no ties to China. Worst thing US can do is use your chat history in court against you. Still safer to use Chinese servers if local is not an option for the task.

revolvingthrow•18m ago

Amusing that just when the big three AI providers from US raise prices significantly, even for the mini models, you’ve got a Chinese model slashing their already-cheap offer by 75%. Not to mention you can run this model on your own hardware, although admittedly even the flash stretches the meaning of local for individual people.

matchbok3•17m ago

Is this being done ahead of the big IPOs coming this year? Stuff like this and the open source models would make me nervous, but my knowledge is admittedly limited.

pcwelder•12m ago

None of the deepseek models are multimodal. How are you guys able to use it in daily work without image input?

For example it's just so natural to share screenshots in a chat.

spiderfarmer•10m ago

I just never do that.

adi_pradhan•11m ago

Great headline cost reduction, but has anyone here actually used the API in production?

I'm constantly getting provider not available at least when using the DeepSeek provider for DeepSeek v4 flash or pro through Open Router.

It seems like there isn't enough capacity to actually serve production traffic

bugglebeetle•8m ago

Use their API directly, this is an openrouter issue. I ran something like 5 billion tokens through them directly recently without any bumps in the road.

olcay_•7m ago

I'm using the official API and I've had no issues.

stormdennis•7m ago

One thing that I find annoying is that it gives results like a teleprinter and so overall takes longer

Nifty3929•7m ago

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.

China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

ufish235•5m ago

What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?

Nifty3929•4m ago

Yes, and yes!

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Comments

DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost

Mastering Dyalog APL

Childhood Computing

Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation

I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

I keep bouncing off the Scheme language

Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date"

Perceptual Image Codec: What Matters in Practical Learned Image Compression

'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused

Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links

Wake up! 16b

Swap tables, flash-friendly swap, swap_ops, and more

DeepSeek to Make Permanent 75% Discount on Flagship AI Model

Silk: Open-source cooperative fiber scheduler

The C64 Dead Test Font

Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

Curly braces: An evolution of Unix and C

Predicting the 2026 Bristol Bay and Kodiak Salmon Runs

Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics

Converting an Integer to a Decimal String in Under Two Nanoseconds

Time to talk about my writerdeck

The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

On The <dl> (2021)

Show HN: Git-based front-end interface for Hugo

Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens

Greg Brockman interview [video]

My two-part desk setup (2025)

The Art of Money Getting

Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)

When (if ever) it's appropriate to make jokes before the US Supreme Court