Agreed; and it really is not that deep.

Realistically; anyone paying for llm access (anthropic, openai, gemini), is getting their access, and a service provided billed by tokens, subscription, whatever.

All the efficiency gains, which publications like deepseek v4.1 flash seriously frontload like it is their most important topic to have accomplished improvements on without diminishing performance too much - now this is a thing anthropic and anyone else also cares about, but for different reasons.

American "providers" with closed models are setting their token pricing somewhat arbitrarily, which is fine: it means more profit, and pretraining and RL experimentation is super important and expensive.

They (closed model providers) have very likely super optimized inference too, just like deepseek, but it's not at all something that any customer really has to care about - they just want the service to be as cheap and great as possible.

I feel like all the closed model providers are milking it as they likely know open models on local hardware will one day eat their lunch. We all know it's not a matter of if but when. The company goes bankrupt, the hardware and property sold off, banks holding the bag.