The move reflects how Chinese companies are competing in the global AI race through a different approach from their US counterparts, which offer cutting-edge model capabilities at premium prices.
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According to third-party benchmark firm Artificial Analysis, the price cut places V4 Pro at the global frontier for cost-efficiency, based on an assessment of the amount of “intelligence” one can extract per dollar.
Amid a global compute supply crunch that has pushed up prices for the most advanced models, the bang-for-the-buck method of comparing different AI models – as opposed to ranking their raw intelligence – has gained popularity in recent months.
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DeepSeek’s official application programming interface (API) price for V4 Pro is now as low as US$0.0036 per 1 million cached input tokens, and US$0.87 per 1 million output tokens.