I'm using Deepseek flash for certain tasks, it is pretty hard to spend $10 on it. All their top models (by usage) are not from frontier labs.

I suspect the main use of these models is for sending mass spam campaigns and other low-value tasks which are very price sensitive.

If you're paid a Western salary and using the model interactively (eg. For coding), you are wasting time+money by using the less good models.

	▲	f311a 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, it's good for coding and faster to iterate. Flash models work almost the same for changes under 1000 LOC when you dictate how you want your code to look. Big models still suck at big changes and big changes are hard to review.