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Even taking into account the fact that they are billing at 75% discount it's still quite cheaper

How did you use it? OpenRouter, or provider directly?

Only similarity it has to Opus 4.6 is the 4 in the name. I do not understand these dishonest comparisons. OOS models are vool, cheap and promising for a future -- but why are we pretending they are better than they are?

Because they give it away for free and offer APIs at very acceptable rates. Not that hard to figure out, Robin Hood stealing our data tax back comes to mind.

I am personally okay helping them as long as they publish the models and dont keep them closed. And I dont trust the settings where providers say they wont train on it.

The cool thing about open-weights model is that you are free to use alternative providers that won't phone home to the original model creators.

I see 6 alternative providers listed on Openrouter for DeepSeek V4 Pro for example.

What do you mean specifically? Data passed through OpenRouter? Or that they too indiscriminately ingest data all over the web? If the former, I assume it's just that anyone still using them just doesn't care where the data comes from. If the latter, well, it seems like every day there's some news on some new model from somewhere, and it takes dedication to complain every time. There's also the factor that I believe DeepSeek is more open with the model, while others keep it entirely proprietary, which feels fairer and (personally) is also less offensive.

My policy is that I don't allow agents to access all code. Some of it is shielded behind bind mounts. Maybe this is a pathetic, artisanal (or ego-driven), reaction of mine to the inevitable. I allow them to work on about 90% of the code (most codebases fully), with some code being considered too valuable to expose to the vendor. When data is involved, LLMs only get to see anonymized data.

This cute policy of mine won't affect anything though. The more we use the models, the more the models will replace this kind of work. Centralisation of power is inevitable; in Medival Europe, we used to have state & church ruling. In modern times but before the internet, it was probably state and banks. Maybe with ongoing digitization (bank offices disappearing) making banks less costly to operate; combined with with bank bailouts, maybe govenments will fully nationalize or at least banks will consolidate.

Then the AI companies will consolidate with the internet information and communication companies (Google/Meta for the US, and Alibaba/Tencent for China). Maybe we'll end up with a few de-facto governmental megacorps that rule in tandem and close cooperation with the formal government, who might handle mostly infra, utilities and the army. The megacorp would control narrative more and take more of a paternal role (educating and protecting the citizens, normally handled by formal governments).

Does this make sense?

If the data is opensource on github, then in my opinion it should be fair game.

AWS Bedrock has DeepSeek models running on their infrastructure. That should be enough to prevent training on user data (there's a markup compared to DeepSeek's pricing though).

And unfortunately AWS doesn't have prepaid billing, so you can't just give the internet access to your API key without getting FinDDoS'd.

Two factors. First is anti-americanism (or at least anti-american-capitalism).

But the more important one is the social contract. Github came far before LLM era. The branding around it is being the storage of open source projects and many users want to it stay away from AI hype. You won't expect LLM providers to stay away from AI hype (duh) so it's less an issue for them.

If they give me the resulting model in the end, they can train on my data all they want. Hell, I'll send them more of it.

Keep in mind that DeepSeek has a max thinking mode of its own in the API.

obviously everyone subsidizes for user acquisition - after all people need to be coaxed to test your model, claude code subscriptions come to me one.

DeepSeek pro is 65/86% cheaper (i/o tokens) in subsidized pro vs pro and 91/97% cheaper with current subsidies.

Flash vs Sonnet 4.6 is 95/98%

Yeah even the Chinese open models have a problem that inference costs for these aren't that cheap. The only way out for the AI bubble collapse is simply more efficient hardware at lower costs and infrastructure setup downtime.

What would be the non-subsidized price for a V4 api? Can it be priced 3x cheaper than bigger models? In Openrouter, this 1600B param model costs 0.4$. Whereas Kimi 2.6, 1000B params is 0.7; GLM 5.1, 754B params is 1.0$.

Someone on Twitter got >200M tokens for around $10 at the current pricing level

Huh? R1 was one of the earliest openly available MoE and reasoning models, that's definitely not "hype". People tried to do reasoning before by asking the model to "think it through step by step" but that was a hack. The later V3.1 and V3.2 releases AIUI unified reasoning/non-reasoning use under a single model.

Thanks for sharing your experience, I’m looking to try it out.

Which provider are you using for inference? Opencode or the DeepSeek api?

It also seems like all of the models have converged on very similar images.

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47839493

I feel the reasoning might be tuned for hard questions and not agentic work. I feel it overthinks, good for a very hard question, not for small incremental agentic steps. In theory, disabling thinking and using really well formed instruction, forcing it to still emit a bunch of tokens each step prior to taking action, could help. Only one way to find out though.

Before CC and Codex removed thinking/verbose and hid most of it, both do that .

I see similar things using GLM 5.1 in pi.

I had to turn off thinking traces because it was just giving me anxiety looking at it.

> Bear in mind open code was also new to me so I could be just seeing thinking where I usually don't

Well there's your problem.

Edit: I remember seeing similar things with ChatGPT or Codex, although I can't remember in which context.

Did you do this test through OpenRouter?