AA prices are always kind of hand wavy for open models. I mean if you rent a cheap gpu and run inference yourself...or heck, what about a cpu instance with a bunch of ram, you can do that with llama.cpp for under a $1/hour. Ok not that, so are we talking about the median spot price per token from a basket of inference providers? Which ones? They actually vary quite a bit, even on openrouter, for this particular deepseek checkpoint it's between $0.15 and $1.20 ... that's like 8x spread...

They have some math here https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology but ok how are the prices weighted among the providers... and even if you do that 7:2:1 math it doesn't match the providers. Specifically the model in question: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash-101... doesn't match the first listed provider https://deepinfra.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017

Do the math yourself, it's actually $0.08 not the AA claimed $0.10 (and that's the more expensive of the two pricing tiers). That's a pretty large error bar.

Also many of the providers are now doing "peak" and "offpeak" pricing (deepseek.com itself for instance) so it can differ dramatically. These "peak" times depend on where the service is most popular. You can basically ride "off-peak" pricing by cascading from global provider to global provider.

The majority of the time taken in an inference call is doing the inference so the extra latency of traveling across an ocean is actually a fairly small wall-clock tax here. People still seem to be partial to nearby servers for ai-related workloads but really, try some decent ones 10,000 km away, you probably won't notice.

I know AA thinks highly of the price metric (I've been to their events, even have their hat, they brag about it) but I have learned to ignore it as noise.

It's an especially strange metric with open-weights decision models. I mean I can run those on my laptop ... cost is very abstract there.

But for closed-source models with only a handful of providers (sometimes just 1) great, the price is a very reasonable number.

For the open models a more useful thing would be like "100 tok/s spot price build" and then it's using pcpartpicker or something in some kind of partnership and can query a build for buying a machine right now that can achieve a certain benchmark number and maybe something for less interactive workloads like "5 tok/s". Of course getting some base unit of power cost in there might be important as well since the power bill is the majority of what you pay for when you rent a commodity gpu.