It's extra interesting because I think the model people should be talking about is actually not DeepSeek V4 Pro, but the Flash version. When accounting for cache hits, the input price (per OpenRouter) is effectively only 6 cents per million tokens (3 vs 14 cents hit/miss), and 28 cents on output. That's really good efficiency, and it's not a sale price like they are doing with V4 Pro, it's the normal price.
It's actually pretty difficult to find a good comparison model because there isn't one. Again, a 14/28 cent in/out model, ignoring cache, it scores just below GPT 5.4 Mini-xhigh (75/450) and Gemini 3 Flash (50/300) in intelligence. It's similar to Gemma 4 31B in some metrics (13/38) including cost, so it's not completely unheard of, but it's pretty notable that virtually everything else in the same region in most benchmarks are going to cost at least 5 times more (much, much more in very output-heavy contexts)
It's well priced but does that have much relevance for "state of the art coding models", specifically?
I wouldn't use Gemini 3 Flash or GPT 5.4 mini for anything except the most trivial work, although both are useful for basic exploratory work.
So I'm using a heavy model for the bulk of the work and the cost of that so far outweighs the light model that the light model cost is effectively irrelevant.
It's so interesting to see the wild pendulum swings of LLM sentiment here.
If one likes a model then it's capable of one-shotting entire apps.
Otherwise it's "only suitable for the most trivial tasks".
Never in between.
It's so true. I bet 80% of questions normal people even ask chatgpt/copilot could be answered with an 8b model trained on recent data.
I don't think people realize how small the gap between free to cheap models have from frontier models. It's going to be commoditized a lot faster than marketing will catch up. Once cash gets tight or prices rise it's more or less done for.
Especially considering some of the small free/cheap models can one shot code now.
You're confusing "different people with different opinions" with "wild pendulum swings".
Personally my opinion in this regard is highly consistent over time.