alt Hacker NewsPrice of the current frontier may vary, but price for a given level of capability tends to drop pretty fast.
April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16 for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per million output tokens.
[0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard
Replies
Denzel • last Tuesday at 3:14 PM
Aren’t DeepSeek models deliberately priced lower than the cost to deliver? They’re subsidized which means the true cost is more than $0.2/Mtok.
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Sure, but i don't think it's reasonable to hold given level of capability constant in a landscape where a give consumer of AI also has competitive pressures.
I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model.
This is also baked in the eye watering valuations of model companies.