You don't consider Input $0.435 Output $0.87 cache read $0.003625 per million tokens for near frontier intelligence cheap?

Energy is likely more abundant in China. I am not sure about compute, but that must be part of reason for such drastic price differences.

The Chinese "Neijuan" is real & well reported: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i...

It is another thing the BigLabs accuse open weight models of benefiting from distillation & other techniques & essentially avoid higher training costs (which typically bleed into bills end users pay for inference).

Ex A: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

Ex B: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/openai-accuses-deepseek-...