Here's an explaination of what's going on in the backend.

Alibaba is forced to do this stuff: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/al...

Meanwhile Deepseek: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45643163#45652636

If one of the dimensions it improves upon is inference cost per unit of work, then switching over to it would save money, and the sooner you do that, the more you save.

Smaller model, likely.

If it's more efficient than 3.8 that it replaces.