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| ▲ | Art9681 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| DeepSeek hasn't proven anything except what they say. You're inherently trusting a company's statements over others. When an independent third party corroborates the numbers then we know for sure. Until then, every company is just selling a story for investors and users. |
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| ▲ | epolanski 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not aware of Chinese law, but I suspect that lying to the public or investors carries risks. | | |
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| ▲ | bakugo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Does DeepSeek offer a heavily subsidized subscription that provides 20x+ more usage than the equivalent value in API tokens? API usage being profitable is completely plausible, but almost nobody pays API prices for Claude and GPT, nor would they be able to afford them if the subscription suddenly stopped existing. |
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| ▲ | vitaflo an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If you're actually asking the question and not being sarcastic, no, Deepseek does not offer subscriptions at all, subsidized or otherwise. You only can use them at the API rates. | |
| ▲ | unchar1 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I doubt that's true for enterprise. In both places I've worked at in the past two years (F500), subscription plans were banned due to data privacy concerns. Everyone _had_ to use the provisioned API tokens (even if they had a personal subscription) | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nope, they don't. Other providers also charge similar prices (who are obviously not subsidising anything) for running DeepSeek models on their own infrastructure. OpenCode Go sort of provides a "subscription" which will let you use DeepSeek but they're extremely transparent about what they're offering. |
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| ▲ | holoduke 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not DeepSeek themselves, but their open models are run by third-party companies in a profitable way. The unsustainable interference theory has been debunked. |
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| ▲ | written-beyond 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Define profit? If by profit you mean covering compute costs then yes you're correct. If by profit you mean covering spent RnD budget and future RnD budget allocations then no, by no means are any of these AI companies running at a profit. Also these third-party providers are running magnitude smaller models than what Anthropic and OpenAI's power users expect from them. Yes the average chat message isn't being routed to the 1+ Trillion param model but people running CC or Codex on Ultra probably are. Those are objectively more expensive. | | |
| ▲ | chrisXOXO 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am citing out of my head here, but think deepseek’s inference engine with their models create around 30 dollars per hours while it costs around 4 dollars, there might be other costs but if you look at the demand, it will become very profitable.
I don’t understand why people are pessimistic about the profitability (I don’t want them to be this successful either). BUT why would they care about profitability right now. They believe in AGI, so do the big money people. They get their investments. This train is not stopping and I believe their predictions are correct (IMO we should not debate about timescales apart from spreading urgency).
And for the lowering of prices, it is possible because they just can and hooking people now into their systems will be 10x more profitable in the future. In addition to all the juicy training data they get with real world clients.
They are scared the others win, they are not scared that they run out of money. | | |
| ▲ | written-beyond 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I got our pocket god ChatGPT to fact check this discussion. No lab is profitable, it is a moonshot to expect they'll ever recover the billions frontier labs have put in behind these DCs. I never understand this argument everyone tries to make, AI is too expensive -> It will get cheaper as they scale -> AI is too cheap and not sustainable -> No it's very profitable on API -> go back to 1. I am not an AI denier, I use it and I find it very useful. That said I can disagree with the current economics of the industry and their business model. | | |
| ▲ | eeedda 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Inference economics only work for those who build on top of the models lol. It should be said that Anthropic and OpenAI suck at product development too - claude for finance, Sora, OpenAI web browser - wtf? Its difficult for people to accept this because many want the model producers to succeed badly. SOrry folks... |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | Art9681 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They are selling inference at severely gimped capability. Even in openrouter the quality and speed of the model being served varies by provider. When you dig into the details (which most people don't do), not all providers are equal. |
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| ▲ | krainboltgreene 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The conditions for DeepSeek's profitability are very very narrow. A key piece being that they have cheap energy, a second key is that they have west/east clients and thus extremely high uptime. |
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| ▲ | trollbridge 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Energy costs (and almost everything else) are a minimal part of providing inference. Most of the cost is depreciation on the GPUs and the HBM. The one number you need to figure out is how much it costs you to buy that GPU and HBM, then how many tokens you can sell from it over its lifespan which is generally amortised over 2 years. | |
| ▲ | ipsum2 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is not correct. Their margins are extremely high, (~1000%), and none of the factors you listed would cause them to have negative margins. |
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