> Excepts it comes with a terrible experience that's not sustainable for any serious day-to-day work that doesn't involve constant coffee breaks to wait for some tokens to get generated.

I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying to be a reference to local models? I am not talking about local. You cannot run DeepSeek on consumer hardware, despite a bunch of people conflating "some 30b model trained on DeepSeek outputs == DeepSeek". But businesses can purchase fleets of GPUs capable of serving DeepSeek for an investment measured in millions rather than billions, and offer something 85% as good as Claude to customers while actually profiting on inference with a $20 subscription, without the massive overhead of training frontier models from scratch.

> (even if someone else is subsidizing it... for now)

That they are giving away something they cannot sustain is the literal entire point of my comment.