DeepSeek plans to raise token prices. I don't think this is because they are bleeding, but they are overwhelmed. If your price is 1/10 of your affiliate vendors, you can't leverage their resources. Markup is the only way to diverge traffic away.
Sadly I haven't found discussions on differentiators enabling DS to balance cost at such low prices. All software solutions (that we know of) are accessible by other vendors. If you attribute it to electricity or hardware, you can't explain why GLM and Kimi charge so much for their APIs.
This is where our attention should be (but distracted by things above).
- Arctic RL integrates with VeRL and SkyRL today; enable ZoRRo with one config flag, no code changes required - ZoRRo delivers up to 6x actor-update acceleration and a 3.5x end-to-end training speedup, reducing Arctic-Text2SQL-R2 training from ~5 days to ~36 hours on 32 H200 GPUs - Arctic-Text2SQL-R2 achieved higher accuracy scores (48.7) than Gemini 3.1 Pro (47.9) and Claude 4.7 (47.3) on Snowflake's evaluated enterprise SQL benchmark under the tested conditions - Two open source recipes ship with this release: a text-to-SQL recipe that improved BIRD dev accuracy from 59.92% to 70.35%, and a multi-hop QA recipe that improved average accuracy from 69.6% to 72.3%