alt Hacker NewsI think they mean that the DeepSeek API charges are less than it would cost for the electricity to run a local model.
Local model enthusiasts often assume that running locally is more energy efficient than running in a data center, but fail to take the economies of scale into account.
Replies
jacquesm • today at 3:50 AM
Some of those local model enthusiasts can actually afford solar panels.
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littlestymaar • today at 3:15 AM
I guess it mostly comes from using the model with batch-size = 1 locally, vs high batch size in a DC, since GPU consumption don't grow that much with batch size.
Note that while a local chatbot user will mostly be using batch-size = 1, it's not going to be true if they are running an agentic framework, so the gap is going to narrow or even reverse.
Local enthusiasts don’t have to fear account banning.