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…
DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence start-up, has announced a "significant" price increase for its API services, as global demand for its ultra-cheap AI model surges. The Hangzhou-based company expects to roll out specific plans in the near future, urging users to plan their usage accordingly. The announcement follows the release of its latest model, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, a lightweight 284-billion-parameter version of the V4 series.
This new model has gained traction globally due to its high performance at rock-bottom prices. However, the price hike raises questions about how DeepSeek plans to maintain its low-cost reputation amidst fierce competition from other AI models like Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna. Despite the potential challenges, DeepSeek's rapid growth and affordability have made its V4-Flash-0731 model the second strongest open-weight AI model on the market, behind only the 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model from Moonshot AI.
On average, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 costs just 3 US cents per task, making it roughly 105 times cheaper than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, which costs US$3.15 per task. This competitive pricing is attributed to DeepSeek's architectural optimization and efficient training strategy, which allows for substantial capacity while using less computation and memory during inference.
Written by urgent.news from SCMP Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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