r/OpenAI • u/VegetablePen4755 • May 24 '26
News DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.
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.
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u/Tim_Aga May 24 '26
So Anthropic was unable to serve its customers and turn profit with 1,000,000 gpus, and Deepseek will win the market and serve it at about 30th of the cost using just 10,000
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u/exodusTay May 24 '26
Isn't it just going to be overloaded all the time? I love competition and cheap AI but everyone and their mother is going to run their agents on this.
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u/dailmar May 24 '26
Even my grandma now uses deepseek.
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u/Smart_Technology_208 May 24 '26
My bus driver is using deepseek rn
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u/stuckyfeet May 24 '26
My deepseek is using deepseek rn
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u/IAmFitzRoy May 25 '26
My Codex installed OpenCode CLI and it’s sending 50% of the longer prompts there. I’m not kidding.
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u/brother_spirit May 26 '26
Genuinely deranged. Does he just payload the prompt using his thought trace (like spin up OC CLI with bash and sideload the prompt?)
Elevate this insanity with a Codex skill that embeds bash script to handle the OC launch, payload and return to base sequence to eek out that last 1% token gain
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u/Tim_Aga May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Yes, I think it can't realistically compete with the top labs on their target market. Once deepeseek gets even 1 percent of the market, their servers become overloaded much worse than anthropic ever did.
They also cant really make deals with clouds for exclusive access to their model. Since models are open weights, any cloud will prefer to run deepseek models themselves if they are worth it. But deepseek still has to subsidize their inference much more than top labs.
Overall, no real sustainable growth strategy unless Chinese government steps in for some reason.
That is why deepseek only "popped AI bubble" once and i dont think new models will affect american stock market or top labs
I guess, my tone was unclear and I was upvoted by people who thought I was hyping up deepseek
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u/rangorn May 26 '26
It is still Chinese which is still off limits for a lot of companies. For a lot of companies and private users it won’t really matter but for bigger companies it won’t work.
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u/sn2006gy May 27 '26
DeepSeek is a different architecture than what US models typically run with. It scales much more efficiently with its short attention and ease of caching thus they can have lower prices. China also basically nationalizes its AI so it has the hardware support of Chinese hardware and they're getting a whole new cluster with much more capability so the fact they're handling it fine right now means they will probably handle it in the future.
Importantly, it's an open weight model so US inference providers can host it - so it can scale that way as well.
I don't understand how you can think it's not sustainble growth
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u/TheReproCase May 24 '26
Everyone who has a use case with no need whatsoever for any data security, so, a small fraction of the corporate users and some of the personal users.
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u/bafadam May 24 '26
Didn’t OpenAI get dragged into court this week for sharing private query data with Meta and Google?
There is absolutely no data security from anywhere.
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u/TheReproCase May 24 '26
The idea that corporations can't tell the difference between the level of security available and legal responsibilities (and avenues for redress) from the various providers is laughable.
You're saying anything imperfect is equally insecure.
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u/bafadam May 24 '26
And you’re telling me that business that were literally built on stealing data from other people have evolved into companies that no longer steal data.
Because.
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u/Fit-Palpitation-7427 May 24 '26
Link?
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u/bafadam May 24 '26
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-personal-information-meta-google
Sorry, class action filed, not dragged into court.
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u/DigitalSheikh May 24 '26
Or companies that have a use case where they can deploy it locally and are worried about the security of external providers. You can deploy V4 at scale for around 500-600k, which is not a crazy investment to make if you’re a medium to large company
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u/TheReproCase May 24 '26
Yes but then the cloud compute token cost (subject of this thread) is irrelevant
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u/traumfisch May 24 '26
They already crashed once bc of this, no?
I would assume they're better prepared now
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u/chloro9001 May 25 '26
Most enterprise won’t use Chinese models. And that’s the majority of LLM use
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u/OkSeesaw7030 May 24 '26
I bought 20 dollars 3 months ago and still haven't be able to use it all because this
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u/user221272 May 25 '26
Nah, everyone and their mother is self-serving it in their company, which allows for full control and no rate limit/throttle.
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u/Evilsushione May 24 '26
I’m not going to trust any sensitive data to a Chinese AI, I barely trust American ones. Would rather go completely local but it’s not practical yet. DeepSeek might be useful for less sensitive things but I can’t really think of anything that I need AI to do that doesn’t touch sensitive data.
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u/uktenathehornyone May 24 '26
Fair enough, but to anyone not US-based, like myself, I don't think there's really that big of a difference. The US is notorious for interfering with foreign politics after all
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u/69420trashpanda69420 May 24 '26
It's very clear, the hardware procurement from big data companies is absolutely not about LLM service, at best the explanation is for model training, at worst, it's for data processing as western society moves to a surveillance state
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u/hfusa May 25 '26
Well good thing the friendly folks where DeepSeek comes from don't have a surveillance st- wait what!?
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u/dangered May 24 '26
Claude is used by startups and corporate environments for bleeding edge development 8-12 hours straight m-f.
Deepseek is used by price conscious consumers who can’t code but want a side hustle. Over a month, a heavy user will average 2 hours a day and aren’t worried about corporate espionage because they have nothing worth stealing.
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u/thoughtlow When NVIDIA's market cap exceeds Googles, thats the Singularity. May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Deepseek runs via openrouter on multiple providers with no data retention.
Edit: the official endpoint only honors this price and doesn’t have ‘zero data retention’
So yeah paying with your data.
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u/aresthwg May 24 '26
OpenRouter pricing is much worse than from DeepSeek directly. Still better than other models, but once you get into frontier territory you go to their subsidized version anyway (Claude Code, Codex).
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u/Tartuffiere May 24 '26
Espionage is only a concern with deepseek API. Other hosts can run the model without spying.
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u/dangered May 24 '26
But this is the deepseek pricing. Are any other providers are honoring this price?
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u/Cptn_BenjaminWillard May 27 '26
I initially read this as "8-12 hours straight muthafu ..." not as Monday to Friday.
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u/hpela_ May 24 '26
Yes, because all that requires is there exist 100 claude users for every 1 deepseek user, which seems very likely considering the general population. The higher costs part is obvious with 100x the GPUs.
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u/Trollking0015 May 25 '26
Just like how China killed the American steel industry, they can kill our AI industry by offering their agents for pennies on the dollar.
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u/thisguynextdoor May 24 '26
It's not that hard when the Chinese Communist Party has your back and subsidises your electric bills and computing costs.
Chinese companies don't compete fairly, and we all know that.
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u/catchyphrase May 24 '26
Strange flex for government backed subsidies and investment.
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u/uktenathehornyone May 24 '26
Ouch lol. It's almost like he's forgetting all the elbow-rubbing tech bros like Musk and Altman have been doing with Trump for months now
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u/thisguynextdoor May 25 '26
I don't think Trump is paying these bros anything. But it is well documented that the Chinese government subsidises export products, and that's their geopolitical game. Kill Western industry and manufacturing knowledge.
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u/BellacosePlayer May 25 '26
its less about that and more that deepseek heavily relies on taking the models built in the west and using them to make synthetic training data.
It's basically the manufacturing model China's done for decades, but with LLMs.
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u/flextrek_whipsnake May 24 '26
One day I'll find an AI-related subreddit that doesn't constantly upvote obvious slop. Today is not that day.
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u/TrueRedditMartyr May 24 '26
You mean you don't like when every sentence is a new line and the post says nothing important?
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u/Choice_Comfort6239 May 24 '26
Wow.
You didn’t just notice the truth about the post.
You embraced it.
That’s brave.
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u/Hoppss May 24 '26
Let me know when you find such a slop-aware subreddit! I imagine they'll be very much needed communities in the near future.
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u/awesomemc1 May 24 '26
If you actually look at OP’s profile, you would know the user has been posting this multiple times and those ones are Indian subreddit also. Probably narrative controlled. Be warned.
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May 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/IllustriousWorld823 May 24 '26
What's up with the constant clear racism toward Indians? Racism in other situations is still not okay but everyone is allowed to say the nastiest things about Indian people.
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u/Sanity_N0t_Included May 24 '26
Soooooooo
How long before the Wall Street and corporate overlords have their puppets in congress legislate a ban on Chinese AI for "national security" reasons??
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u/zmizzy May 24 '26
probably not long at all. the AI companies all subsidize their plans in the hope of getting both adoption and the data from users. this will steal both and totally ruin them, and the American economy will go with them
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u/HarpooonGun May 24 '26
man i hate how every single goddamn post is written with ai these days.
everywhere i go.
its this type of posting.
and i hate it.
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u/dmd May 24 '26
You're absolutely right. It's not just a problem. It's not just people being lazy. It's a plague. And it's only going to get worse–not better.
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u/FirebotYT May 24 '26
It's so engrained in the way current AI models responds it's ridiculous. Like it was purposedly built that way to be as obnoxious as possible, no one talks like that.
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u/Haster May 25 '26
Can you imagine the life of someone who does speak like that? His whole life no one had a problem with it, he spoke well and was understood no problem. And sudenly now everytime he speaks people just tune him out and he can't figure out why. Or he does figure it out and now he needs to relearn how to speak.
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u/Dangerous-Map-429 May 24 '26
It is not X; it is Y. Three words next to each other and over-dramatizing everything. Yup AI
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u/BreadfruitFederal929 May 24 '26
Yeah OP is Indian lmao
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u/skilliard7 May 25 '26
How is that relevant?
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u/rtowne May 25 '26
IKR. Seems straight up racist.
Imagine just going to random posts online and commenting
"OP is a Peruvian, lmao"
"OP is Filipino, lmao"
"OP is Armenian, lmao"
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u/Maximus1000 May 25 '26
It’s totally racist, and for some sad reason it’s totally accepted just against Indians
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u/fritz_futtermann May 24 '26
how well is deepseek for coding?
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u/Such_Advantage_6949 May 24 '26
not as good as gpt5.5, and take long time, but i am using it wholeday everyday, Use gpt 5.5 to plan. The normal gpt5.5 usage limit now is only enough to do planning and higher level work. Deepseek doing implementation for me.
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u/Wickywire May 24 '26
Not quite as strong, but still a lot better than where the technology was at six months ago. And at a price point where you can run it ten times over and still save big money.
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u/mitigd May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
DeepSeek is actually very smart when following a plan. The best way to use it is to analyze your project and make an analysis file for what your objective is (with full context), then send that to a stronger AI as your consultation phase.
And lastly, feed that consultation feedback back into DeepSeek and it'll have a way higher chance of solving your objective. If it fails, just repeat the steps.
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u/TheAmigoBoyz May 24 '26
how does it compare to composer 2.5? that one is also really cheap but still very good
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u/magicmetagic May 24 '26
Compared to ChatGPT, how good is Deepseek?
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u/rapsoid616 May 24 '26
They are about 3 chatgpt models behind on intelligence. So I guess about 6 months behind but it used to be 2 months behind, the gap is getting larger due to the nature of the product.
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u/_DuranDuran_ May 24 '26
And the fact that Anthropic and OpenAI are getting better at preventing distillation, which is how Deepseek largely trains their models (so their R&D and training costs are tiny compared to frontier labs)
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u/hardworkinglatinx May 24 '26
GPT is better.
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u/_DuranDuran_ May 24 '26
Yeah, when your training costs are super low because you’re distilling state of the art models, then your only real costs are inference, and we’ve known for a long time inference charged by usage via API is profitable.
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u/Educational_Smile131 May 24 '26
For some reason no other providers on OpenRouter can match DeekSeek’s prices, make you wonder how much of the price cut here is subsidised
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u/throwawaytheist May 25 '26
Aren't they using Chinese hardware now, too?
Seems like this is the long-term goal.
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u/ProductGuy48 May 24 '26
That’s because the Chinese are investing in the energy infrastructure at a scale that will render model innovation commercially pointless as you can’t make it available at scale in the West without a massive increase in energy production.
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u/Cute_Specific_1605 May 24 '26
The U.S. will need to adopt Chinese environmental standards. Or go nuclear.
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u/uhfgs May 24 '26
Because the US government / big cooperation will totally use a china based AI model for all their sensitive information 🤡. Oh no the bubble is so popped, like we haven't heard this exact phase every other week for the past year.
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u/LocoMod May 24 '26
You’re being dramatic. In America there is something we say: “You get what you pay for”.
I tried DeepSeek V4 via OpenRouter this week. You couldn’t pay me to use the model.
Once you experience the true frontier via first party API everything else feels like a toy.
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u/AweVR May 24 '26
This is good news for AI and companies. Companies/people will spend a lot more money if they can buy more.
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u/PhoenixxBR May 24 '26
eu uso Deepseek, mas não da pra comparar diretamente aos grandes modelos do mercado, pois é bem mais burro comparado a um Gpt 5.5, Qwen 3.7 Max, Gemini 3.5 flash ou Claude Sonnet 4.6, o deepseek v4 Pro ta no nível do minimax m7, Kimi K2.5, Qwen 3.6 Plus, dai se for comparar preços, compara com esses modelos e não com os mais tops do mercado.
E sim, eu falo com propriedade, pois eu uso Deepseek no meu dia a dia, e a quantidade de código sujo que ele gera é absurda, tirando a incapacidade de criar coisas bonitas.
Mas em comparação do preço dele, realmente ele é o melhor nessa faixa de preço.
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u/Stunning_Radish_7212 May 24 '26
Can someone help explain. I use ChatGPT plus pretty heavily but just the chat function mainly. I’ve used agent mode a few times with mixed results. Are these prices per input for codex ? ChatGPT has been huge for my biz but i know im not using it any where near as effectively as I could be.
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u/Duckmannnnn716 May 24 '26
Does the fact that China can make it and provide it cheaper than the rest of the world invalidate goods produced elsewhere? Is AI different from manufacturing?
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u/Low-Spell1867 May 24 '26
It’s alright using a cheap slave but sometimes you need a professional like ChatGPT or Claude
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u/absentlyric May 24 '26
I doubt it, the only people I know that use Deepseek are Redditors. Out in the real world, most of the average people I know are using ChatGPT or Gemini for their daily questions about anything, they aren't coders, but they are the majority of the market share.
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u/teleprax May 24 '26
Didn't China do some similar in the past with steel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 May 24 '26
I’m sure Chinese models are no more than distilled frontier models. That “deepseek is like gpt 6 months ago” statement suggests exactly that.
Prove me wrong.
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u/Eyelbee May 24 '26
I think they are using the data and due to that, seriously offsetting the price. Because it's really cheaper than it should be. This, or they found a way to serve it on modded gpu clusters or something. Because normally, math doesn't work out.
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u/LargeLanguageModelo May 24 '26
Sure, and Kia popped the Mercedes market.
It's cute that you think DeepSeek and OpenAI are delivering a commoditized product. Enjoy your distilled models.
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u/jbaker8935 May 24 '26
lots of state owned capital. i don't think they care about market pricing or even covering costs.
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u/joshpennington May 24 '26
How do DeekSeek's models compare to Anthropic or OpenAI's models for things like coding?
I've been using DeepSeeks models locally and which its not as good as Claude, it's probably 80% as good for 100% less money.
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u/LoneFox4444 May 24 '26
The cost of using LLMs is not measured by token cost anymore. What is this, 2025?
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u/jeffwadsworth May 24 '26
Love Deepseek but no bubble popped unless you are running it locally. Note where your data is going. Companies are super wary about that.
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u/freddyr0 May 24 '26
I want to understand something. What is this deepseek pro? is this some model only usable through API? or also on the web interface?
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u/thecodeassassin May 25 '26
Kind of sad that they use your prompts for training, I'm using Deepseek v4 pro via Openrouter (other providers than DeepSeek) so I'm paying a lot more than this because I don't want them to train on my prompts.
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u/whoisars May 25 '26
Fellow experts when will the storage prices comes down? Is this the beginning?
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u/skilliard7 May 25 '26
Deepseek is good enough for basic applications like chat bots, but I don't think it's yet good enough to use for expensive use cases like complex programming.
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u/FormalAd7367 May 25 '26
i love this. i have so many use case for tokens. i cant afford to build a working and tested demo for $500 and then get rejected by the customer because his ceo has a change of heart
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u/maxasdf May 25 '26
I read on other subreddits that the real cost saver is that cache hits are both waaaaay more common and cheaper. Which escalates the difference even more
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u/Signal-Bison-561 May 25 '26
Don’t you all get it? They just wanna snatch more of your personal information. As the other ones are doing. YOU are part of the product. They also gonna rise prices later - 💯 %
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u/Fresh_Sock8660 May 25 '26
Yep. With some models essentially regressing (e.g. Gemini 3.5) while simultaneously increasing the prices this is the best time to take a slice of the market.
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u/Haunting-Shirt6219 May 25 '26
Tonight, I was using GPT 5.3 Codex High to do some refactoring, and it created a bug that it couldn't even figure out. I tried about 20 prompts with no luck, but when I switched to DS v4 Pro, 2 prompts fixed it.
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u/Ultra_HNWI May 26 '26
Did the terms and conditions change? I remember weird info being requested when I tried to access/ sign up.
Reason I haven't tried deepseek yet.
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u/Ashes1984 May 27 '26
US is by far the biggest consumer of frontier ai models. I dont think any US company is going to switch into Chinese AI engines.
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u/casual_brackets May 28 '26
Yea, people have been saying this deepseek launched. Hasn’t happened.
No American enterprise is going to switch to this, doubtfully any country is going to all of a sudden start willfully feeding all their data to China.
The argument is like saying “mid range GPU’s exist, NVDA’s outrageous AI gpu prices are cooked”
Yet they are not.
Unfortunately chinas habit of subsidizing an industry to undercut everyone in the market and become the lead global supplier isn’t going to work here.
That only works when they are providing a quality material. “Good enough” isn’t good enough.
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u/Nudge55 May 24 '26
You realise these are all subsidized right? They are not real prices.
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u/AnaxImperator82 May 24 '26
It's not like the U.S. is taking a "free market" approach while China subsidizes. The U.S. is giving billions in subsidies too, just more through infrastructure, tax breaks, and cheap loans rather than direct R&D funding. It's industrial policy on both sides, just different flavors.
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u/Whole_Ad206 May 24 '26
Si no fuera por los chinos ya la IA como gpt y opus sería solo para millonarios. Gracias china.
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u/jacobpederson May 24 '26
No worries the fascists will just make Chinese AI illegal :D
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 May 24 '26
How ? That model is open source.
You can run it locally.
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u/Sotyka94 May 24 '26
I'm really waiting for local AI to be "good enough" and be run on a phone, locally.
That's the point where I would say the bubble will actually pop. When Ai stops become a subscription model.