The Unbearable Cheapness of Open Weight Models
jamesoclaire.com ● Covered by 3 sources
DeepSeek V4 and other open-weight models cost roughly 50 times less per token than OpenAI and Anthropic's frontier models, prompting questions about whether the established companies can compete on price or will rely on luxury positioning and potential regulatory barriers instead. The author notes that open-weight models from DeepSeek and Xiaomi's Mimo achieve low costs through stress-testing by multiple users, while OpenAI and Anthropic maintain high prices by restricting access and cultivating premium brand status. True open-source competition—with training data pipelines fully released—remains limited, though initiatives like Allen AI's OLMo and an NSF-Nvidia partnership for fully open AI represent potential future directions.
Why it matters
DeepSeek V4 offers lower pricing compared to Anthropic and OpenAI models, highlighting a nearly 50x price difference based on token usage and raising concerns about whether major companies can compete with more affordable open weight alternatives.