> 1M cached tokens on deepseek is $0.006, the big labs can't sell anywhere close to this, they have funders expecting returns and huge overhead.

Losing most of your customers tends to sharpen the mind a bit. They could eg stop pushing out the absolute frontier for a while and focus on making what they have run cheaper. Or they go and do more lobbying against China. Or a million other little things that take more than 30 seconds to come up with when writing a HN comment, but less than a week for someone who's smart and paid to do this for a living.

I did a lot of that kind of work with the older version of DeepSeek before they upped the prices.

For example, it was quite good to get a decent Sashiko review. Sashiko is a Linux kernel review agent with interchangeable LLM driver. It's very good, but it eats tokens like crazy.

That's 1/3 of GPT 5.6 Luna. It seems rather close to me.

But great that we have a new leader in performance/price in that segment.

Yep. 4.1 Flash is good enough for most routine coding things, but it also makes up for a lot of weakness by being so fast (and cheap of course).

I'm willing to tolerate babysitting things a lot more if I know I'll get almost instant results.