DeepSeek signals ‘significant’ price hike amid surge in demand for low-cost AI models
DeepSeek announced on Thursday a “significant” price hike, amid surging global demand for a new ultra-cheap model, which sparked debate over how the Chinese AI start-up has delivered powerful performance at rock-bottom prices. DeepSeek would raise overall pricing for its application programming interface (API) services “in the near future”, with specific plans to be advised later, the…
The Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek has announced a "significant" price increase for its application programming interface (API) services, amid a surge in global demand for an ultra-cheap model. This decision has sparked debate over the company's ability to maintain its low-cost reputation in the fiercely competitive AI market. The latest model, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, a lightweight version of the V4 series, was unveiled a week prior to the price hike notice.
The new model, currently the second strongest open-weight AI model on the market, has gained traction for its remarkable performance combined with extremely low prices. On average, it costs 3 US cents per task, making it roughly 105 times cheaper than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. DeepSeek's success in offering such competitive pricing is attributed to architectural optimization and an efficient training strategy.
Its mixture-of-experts design and multi-teacher knowledge distillation technique enable the model to maintain substantial capacity while using less computation and memory during inference.
Written by urgent.news from South China Morning Post's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
