If the difference is that large, it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share, this is not exactly the first time the Chinese government has done so (or at least been rumoured to have done so).
You should assume that everyone has a hidden agenda when money is involved.
Pricing for DeepSeek V4 flash is $0.14 in/$0.28 out across basically every provider or close to it. It seems most providers just follow the model creator and set their prices to match. V4 pro was set to be $1.74 in/$3.48 out when DeepSeek first announced it; all providers have set their prices to be about that price, & now DeepSeek has set their pricing to $0.435 in/ $0.87 out. I don't know if this is special pricing, or the promise they made for dropping the price when they get more Huawei cards online. It seems that providers like ParaSail, Together, and Novita just set the price when the model comes out and don't compete.
No one has yet to turn a profit from LLMs. I don't understand why we need to intently look at everybody's pricing, when the most important number is instead their losses. That is the number that tells us what they're really doing.
Why would these 3rd-party providers be taking losses? Together, Novita, etc... are not losing money on inference services, they are profiting. You can easily do napkin math with current & last gen Nvidia cards to calculate cost to host/serve these models. I would also doubt that any 1st-party providers like OpenAI and Anthropic lose money on per token billing. There is almost undoubtedly healthy margin being made on that.
OpenRouter isnt turning a profit?
> it seems plausible to me that the Chinese models are subsidized in order to gain market share
In this case, this point is kinda moot since the entire US and SV tech ecosystem, has been subsidized first by the US defense industry during the cold war, and after by the US government funded VCs by its unique cheat-code ability to infinitely print the world reserve currency with little to no inflation consequences upon its own economy, and dump it on its tech sector or on the free market to buy foreign competitors before they become a challenge, in order to be ahead of everyone else.
Given this, I find criticisms of China's state subsidize to pale in comparison, when we talk about what is "fair".