I'll be honest, I typed that message while having morning coffee, so it's just a quick reaction from my part, not a heavily researched article in a journal :)

But I do think that the median price where this settles will tell us something about the floor at which it is profitable to serve this model.

> DeepSeek, which hosts DS v4, profitably

I specifically mentioned 3rd party providers, because there can be an argument that model creators themselves are subsidising tokens to gather training data for the next model. In fact, ds are public about their gathering of data (at least on openrouter they're marked as such). So that 0.x price point for dsv4-pro is likely subsidised.