A few days ago we got the news that DeepSeek makes 38 dollars profit per card with their off peak pricing (in the inference server release discussion).
If that is true, either the American labs are not optimizing correctly or they make a ton of money with inference.
There are lots of reasons Chinese AI companies will always be cheaper than Western AI companies, but chief among them is that China is pouring ludicrous amounts of money into new energy generation projects.
Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, they are building it all, as we speak, at least 10x more than the US. They are aiming to not just be energy independent, but energy dominant.
You can't now (and certainly won't in the future) be able to run an AI provider in the West as profitably as you can in China.
Finland has a lot of people who care about forest and Finland needs to pay fines for EU if they don't have enough forest to suck CO2 from the air.
Google cut corners here, and didn't ask for the needed permissions. And the prime minister doesn't want to show his conversation with Google regarding this.
People are really pissed.
Edit: and the electricity prices are going up due to these data centers. And the profits from them don't stay in Finland, but go to American corporations. There should be Finnish data centers owned by Finns instead of having Google to take the cheap electricity and taking profits out.
Same thing with data centres in Norway. We're planning to waste heaps of our renewable energy on generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV. For what? Luckily there's been more political pushback against it here recently, but it's so tame. Just for once I'd like to see some conviction. Pause all ongoing constructions, and launch corruption probes into all the local politicians that pushed this stuff through. I bet there's lots of corruption there. On a national level, we don't have corruption on anything near the systemic scale you see in the US. Some bad apples, and lots of mole hills made into mountains by the press, but nothing like the US where it seems like most of congress is pretty much openly corrupt.
Local politicians though? Oh boy. Seems like every time there's some ongoing project in a smaller municipality involving commercial exploitation of natural resources(like undeveloped land, minerals, hydropower capacity, etc) there's a mayor and/or municipal council members who profit from it financially or otherwise. They have shares/board seats in a holding company owning the land, local contractors, etc. Seems like this is very widespread, and rarely leads to serious consequences, and even when it does, it happens so late that the project is already built, or so far underway it doesn't get stopped. Shit pisses me off.
I'm sure data centres are no different. Because I can't imagine a cost-benefit analysis of them that makes any sense from the point of view of the local community.
>generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV.
People say that, but users are the ones capturing most if not almost all of the profit.
You don't cut Anthropic a check every time a new user signs up on your platform. You pay them a small slice of the revenue that their models generate for you.
Like... the town where the Google datacenter goes gets like some paved bike road from Google who "takes care of the community". Price tag around the profits of less than an hour of the GPU time in that datacenter.
You know those companies are publicly owned and big % of American public owns shares in them?
Additionally Google employs some 100k people in US and almost as many in Europe.
Those are mostly very good jobs as well.
The whole anti-datacenters sentiments is stupid but "profits go to a handful of Americans" is just pants of fire kind of take.
You reminded me of something. I heard in the Czech Republic when communism ended, the state owned industries became owned by the public. Every citizen received a share.
I wonder if we're going to need something similar when AI nukes the economy.
It worked that way in Russia too. Some people managed to quickly consolidate those shares by exploiting the economic hardship of the people caused by the fall of the USSR by hoovering up those shares for Kopecks on the Rubel, and that's where the current day oligarchy was formed.
The transition from communism to capitalism was hardly as rosy as people in the West like to think.
Of course, how this unfolded varied. For example, unlike the chaotic Russian privatization that created a class of oligarchs, the transition in places like Poland favored a network of well-placed insiders, a highly structured network of intelligence officers (military, civilian), state managers, and flexible communist party elites, who - by controlling information, intelligence networks, and the liquidation apparatus - effectively laundered their authoritarian political privileges into financial dominance.
Yes. Should also cover what happened in East Germany when the wall went down. And people are now somehow surprised when everybody's kind of pissed outside of the few big cities.
There was a West Berlin bunch of real estate tycoons that got wind the wall was about to fall and they went across and started buying property left, right and center. They made billions on that, effectively owning the heart of Berlin post unification.
Funny story: I once got arrested at Checkpoint Charlie :)
Here some pics from those empty skyscrapers that are completely missing all the walls and the scaffolding's been gathering rust for years. And all the court cases for the people who bought the "luxury apartments" that never realized.
I'm always surprised that the topography of terror exhibition in Berlin misses this part of the German history. Nazi's and communists are presented, but the robber barons who bought all the real estate don't get a presentation.
Right, I think if we all had the same transparency, regulatory oversight, and involved electorate, we'd be as concerned with the other massive logging projects around the world.
I'm glad this one is getting attention, though. May the Finnish people show us how we can get it right.
Oh the logging projects also get a LOT of attention. It's just that the current government is center-right / far right, and they just let the logging to continue no matter the sanctions from the EU.
There are a lot of people who are against this, and protest against this. Looking at the polls, seems that it will change in the next elections, like a lot.
I'm using DeepSeek a lot, and I'm curious how you get a task to go to ten dollars with it? Or are you mixing Opus and Sol tokens to the same task? I have very hard time to go over 5 dollars with DeepSeek and that is already a weeklong project where I share the same context.
Of course I do certain things like use omp and do a compact picture snapshot after 256k tokens automatically. My tasks rarely go over a dollar...
I've ported a few games, wrote a cosmic desktop app, iterated in my own agent software, use the model in our home speaker system, use the model in my phone assistant. My monthly bill to coralbricks is about 14 dollars.
I also used to plan with more expensive models like you did, but now I just do planning with DeepSeek too and don't see much difference. I use the omp plan mode and iterate on the text until I'm happy with it. Then clear context, give the plan to DeepSeek again for implementation.
If it's mission-critical code, do a security review with GLM 5.3.
Otherwise go manually through the code and ask for changes if needed.
Or just us Europeans who are so sick of American corporations milking every penny with their LLM models and preventing us from using the full model capabilities.
Now we have: a ton of competition in different inference providers, very low costs, and speeds reaching 1k tok/s in certain providers.
We can just get a box of compute even in Germany, and run the exact same model here without anybody stopping us.
It's quite different here in EU. I just gave a presentation in an AI conference in Paris about moving from Anthropic to open-weight models, how it looks like and what kind of savings you'll be looking at. The room was packed, and after discussing with a bunch of VPs, staff engineers, and CTOs in the conference, every single one of them are either looking at or using DeepSeek now.
It's quite hard to have the valuation of Anthropic if they are limited to US.
I mean... I ported some of my childhood Finnish shareware games for Linux and Rust with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. It took about six hours of spelunking and finally I was pretty happy with the results! I did it twice. Tokens for both of the games were around 3 euros.
I feel like I’m getting good value out of my subscription and they have the cheapest GLM-5.3 API rates I could find in Europe. I moved to them recently from Mistral for the better prices.
They do have a slightly different daily inference capacity allowance, but it’s actually not too bad once used to it. I was forced to up my game and figure out what GLM-5.3 Flash and Deepseek-4.1 Flash could actually do for me, rather than just throwing everything at GLM-5.3. Quite happily chugging along with a nice balance across them now.
I am hoping Melious make the new DS 4.1 Flash 1017 available soonest.
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