> That blog post is not very compelling either. Without knowing details of the architecture, comparing the various frontier models to open models doesn’t make sense.

Why do you need to know the architecture? Just compare Deepseek V4's performance with GPT 4 and treat internals as a blackbox. Deepseek is much cheaper and way more performant. If you can agree to reasonable assumptions

1. that closed source models are more efficient than open source

2. Deepseek is served at a profit and not a loss

Then it is pretty clear that the prices have gone down. If the prices have gone down more than 20x-30x then surely it is not _still_ subsidised is it?

I think this amount of skepticism is not warranted here. Every reasonable explanation or proxy is met with "but you don't know what they really do" is naive.

It is borderline conspiratorial to believe it this way.

I don’t find it at all reasonable that closed source models are more efficient. The people involved had different circumstances and it naturally affects their work

> 1. that closed source models are more efficient than open source

Not a reasonable assumption for a variety of reasons.

> 2. Deepseek is served at a profit and not a loss

Not a reasonable assumption either.

> Why do you need to know the architecture? Just compare Deepseek V4's performance with GPT 4 and treat internals as a blackbox.

Because the internals are what actually matter and what drives inference cost.

It would be entirely reasonable to expect that GPT-5.5 has some sort of optimizations or changes to the architecture to make it easier to train, or to make runtime ablation easier, or to better handle large batches, or whatever.

Those changes, particularly if they are non-public, can easily result in worse inference performance than a comparably sized model without those changes.

> It is borderline conspiratorial to believe it this way.

It's not any sort of conspiracy. It's how land-grab tech companies have always worked. To presume otherwise is silly.