This may not 'quite a bit behind' those at all. If you look at the benchmark numbers they are very comparable to Fable, but beyond a certain point the benchmark numbers don't tell you much. Opus #5 beats Fable on some benchmarks but given similar cost almost everyone who has used those two models will prefer to use Fable.

At this price range $0.87per 1M they will get a lot of usage of people trying it out. Given the benchmark numbers, for many people and many use cases this will become their primary driver. There are people and use cases where Fable, Sol will work better but those are likely not the target of DeepSeek anyway.

In terms of performance and price pareto curve I don't think any model can beat this today (though openAI is doing some exciting recent work in efficiency) - which is a remarkable feat for the DeepSeek team.

Either way, what a time for consumers of these models :)