alt Hacker NewsInference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.
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surgical_fire • today at 8:13 PM
I see no evidence anywhere that "inference is cheap". To my knowledge this is a myth being spread to pretend ChatGPT or Claude will one day make any economic sense.
DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.
DeepSeek is very likely selling tokens at a loss. There're many cloud providers that provide you with DeepSeek V4 Pro via API, and those services at least twice as expensive as DeepSeek itself.