I've been using it as part of a complex DOS game decompilation project[0]. I'm working on refactoring the software rendering pipeline so that we can add GPU rendering. The hardest part of this so far is converting the 90's polygon rendering from screen to world space.
It spun its wheels a few times doing a large mostly mechanical change. After resetting and improving my prompts it was able to get through it. I'm using Matt Pocock's skills[1] for this work, which has been quite nice.
If you have actually used DeepSeek, you would notice that the cache-hit rate is extremely high, and the cache invalidation window is much longer than every other provider's. That suggests DeepSeek is simply much better at utilizing its infrastructure than other vendors.
I am also highly skeptical that the average user's input is worth more than the API cost of processing it. Do people really think DeepSeek researchers enjoy panning for gold in a river of boilerplate and half-baked code?
But, overall, the current AI pricing is completely unsustainable, across all AI companies, except via the exponential growth they are relying on. Dylan Patel did the most insightful analysis of this I've come across.. https://youtu.be/mDG_Hx3BSUE?si=nyJu4adwYCH1igbJ
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/deepseek-nears-45...
Sincerely, - I see you AI companies harvesting our data giving us discounted subscriptions so we can not realize we are paying you to take our own data!
Anthropic is learning that lesson now. Doesnt help that their ceo goes around antognozing everyone by claiming jobs are over and annoying boris does like 500 podcasts per week repeating "coding is solved"
For anyone doing the "should I self-host on rented GPUs?" math: at this rate you'd need to push roughly 1B output tokens/day to break even against an 8xH100 fleet on Vast/Lambda (assuming 3-5k tokens/sec aggregate throughput). The vast majority of "I should run my own LLM" use cases don't come close to that volume.
Every API price drop kills another tranche of "self-host the open model" use cases. The implied bet: even if regular pricing ($1.74/M output) is also subsidized, exponential demand growth eventually makes the unit economics work. We'll see.
v4-pro (75% off): $0.003625 / $0.435 / $0.87
v4-pro (regular): $0.0145 / $1.74 / $3.48
v4-flash: $0.0028 / $0.14 / $0.28
that is damn cheap.
Nothing specific to Deepseek.
I also struggle to find a provider that can credibly convince me I wouldn't be a product for when using. Have you found one?
It's the same reason why I prefer vpns that are owned by countries outside my own.
This is true of anthropic or openai - but for some reason I think the us govt or anyone else will have a harder time getting to my data from them than the CCP will any chinese company.
From this line of reasoning, my guess is that the huge discount is not so much intended to sell the data collection system as much as it is intended to sell the model. If you had to wring a geopolitical consequence from this, it would be that the US labs producing models would be impacted by a vastly less expensive competitor.
i'd like to point out that the soviet RDS-3 was an airdropped A-bomb.
I get that you mean 'in anger', but I don't feel that bad being a pedant against a propagandist statement that's also pedantically wrong.
Occasionally I go and try different agents with openrouter models, but nothing seems to really get close to the proprietary ones like claude-code.
By the way OpenRouter version is very slow for some reason. DeepSeek platform is faster (and cheaper with the discount) if you don't mind passing the credit card number / email to this company.
Sidenote, I've been trying deepseek-v4-flash and I'm blown away. It's no Opus, but it's as cheap as tap water and punches far above its weight as a Flash model. I keep throwing tasks at it out of curiosity and it keeps solving them.
