Benchmark performance - better models are actually great for Nvidia's bottom line, since the company is relying on the advancement of AI as a whole.
Inference cost - DeepSeek is charging less than OpenAI to use its public API, but that isn't an indicator of anything since it doesn't reflect the actual cost of operation. It's pretty much a guarantee that both companies are losing money. Looking at DeepSeek's published models the inference cost is in the same ballpark as Llama and the rest.
Which leaves training, and that's what all the speculation is about. The CEO said that the model cost $5.5M and that's what the entire world is clinging on. We have literally no other info and no way to verify it (for now, until efforts to replicate it start to show results).
>Inference cost - DeepSeek is charging less than OpenAI to use its public API, but that isn't an indicator of anything since it doesn't reflect the actual cost of operation.
Again, the weights are public. You can run the full-fat version of R1 on your own hardware, or a cloud provider of your choice. The inference costs match what DeepSeek are claiming, for reasons that are entirely obvious based on the architecture. Either the incumbents are secretly making enormous margins on inference, or they're vastly less efficient; in the first case they're in trouble, in the second case they're in real trouble.
R1's inference costs are in the same ballpark as Llama 3 and every other similar model in its class. People are just reading and repeating "it is cheap!!" ad nauseam without any actual data to back it up.
Inference cost - DeepSeek is charging less than OpenAI to use its public API, but that isn't an indicator of anything since it doesn't reflect the actual cost of operation. It's pretty much a guarantee that both companies are losing money. Looking at DeepSeek's published models the inference cost is in the same ballpark as Llama and the rest.
Which leaves training, and that's what all the speculation is about. The CEO said that the model cost $5.5M and that's what the entire world is clinging on. We have literally no other info and no way to verify it (for now, until efforts to replicate it start to show results).