1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead.

btw I've had a ton of fun with the new deepseek today, I was waiting for my OpenAI 5h limit reset and decided to give it some problems for fun, got pretty great results. Tried some harder problems and still got great results. I don't expect it to be Sol class or anything but I really didn't expect it to be anywhere near this good so we'll see where it ends up. And it's really fun throwing crazy amount of tokens at the wall for ~free instead of watching the subscription limits tick closer while your agents churn away.

That's 1/3 of GPT 5.6 Luna. It seems rather close to me.

But great that we have a new leader in performance/price in that segment.

Yep. 4.1 Flash is good enough for most routine coding things, but it also makes up for a lot of weakness by being so fast (and cheap of course).

I'm willing to tolerate babysitting things a lot more if I know I'll get almost instant results.