Since the 3rd party providers on openrouter have all converged on much higher prices in serving these models (both mimo and dsv4), there's obviously a question on how/why are they lowering the prices so much.
It's possible they've finally integrated cheap(er) chinese chips. It's also possible they're just subsidising inference for real-world usage data. Interesting either way.
The difference is that releasing the model for free doesn't have ongoing cost for the company. Providing cheap tokens is very expensive - specially if you don't have access to the latest transistor node chips. So I think the parent comment is right, there's something else at play allowing DS and Xiaomi to offer these nearly free tokens.
That's deliberate. US AI companies have no chance of recouping even fraction of their valuations.
PS: Have not tried this but Deepseev4 Flash (not even Deepseekv4 Pro version) with set to "high" has pretty much Claud Opus 4.7 level of capabilities and is lightening fast and dirty cheap. Hours and hours of conversation barely costs few cents.
They can (not entirely sure how 'grey' market this is) either have subsidiaries outside of china (eg: singapore) that provide the inference and/or just rent it off the public gpu clouds.
"The api pricing for mimo-v2-pro and mimo-v2-omni remain unchanged" could we presume this means the discount isn't from hardware improvement or availability ?
Chinese models incidentally slurps up some terms that lead them to finding unflattering words that you wrote about the CCP in a random journal entry, or maybe a social media csv export. You go to China one day and are denied entry due to what you said.
Realistic or no? (yes i know the us is getting bad in re. to what you write online as well)
Models hosted in China are a siren call that I don't feel bad about resisting.
This statement makes no sense, because you literally said the "US is getting bad". We already gave up all of our data, if you wrote something about the CCP you should already expect they know about it.
Well, at least for the Chinese models you can run them locally vs. the US models that requires you to go through their servers. But to answer your question:
> How realistic is this:
Completely unrealistic unless you are a high value target (journalist, spy, business man, etc...)
Will try MiMo now. I have been mainly using just DeepSeek lately because of the fact that V4-Flash destroys basic work for basically 0 cost. Haven't exceeded even 50% of my OpenCode Go weekly limits using V4 Flash and Pro.
Everyone already said what I wanted to say. That all US companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, MS Copilot) have increased price recently while Chinese companies (Deepseek, Xiaomi) are reducing price.
The question is how they are managing to do so? They are supposed to struggle due to chip sanctions.
Secondly, why now? The US companies were supposed to subsidize too but now they are unable to keep up. Everyone going to usage based pricing, so it's unsustainable for them. They are well funded too.
If there are genuine hardware breakthrough reducing compute needs then that is good for the whole world I believe.
I hope so, but I don't know if they are in a position where they can offer these kinds of prices. They are already struggling with not losing a lot of money with their models, while chinese models can be independently hosted by inference providers at a profit already. We need to drive these prices down so AI doesn't become a thing for the few who can pay for expensive subscriptions.
Industrial Chinese electricity costs is similar to that of Texas, It's 8-9cents a kWh. The only benefit is industrial China decides to put millions of solar panels down, so "peak" sunlight hours can drop electricity costs significantly since their rates are highly dynamic.
I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo). I think the government probably wants actually-useful AI that could be put into chips and actually revolutionize factory work or mining or whatever. Large, SOTA models are not gonna change factory work but extremely efficient and optimized models may
Every industry-wide scale technological revolution has happened because government funded a technology and then opened it up to the masses. Just look at your iPhone: GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't)
Economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a great book about this called The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
> I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo)
I really don't think China cares about that. Chinese government's governance logic is making everything so cheap that everyone can get and use it. They did it with EVs and other things. Now they are doing it with the AI.
Since the 3rd party providers on openrouter have all converged on much higher prices in serving these models (both mimo and dsv4), there's obviously a question on how/why are they lowering the prices so much.
It's possible they've finally integrated cheap(er) chinese chips. It's also possible they're just subsidising inference for real-world usage data. Interesting either way.
> there's obviously a question on how/why are they lowering the prices so much.
Same reason they release some of the models for free: They are trying to capture market share.
The difference is that releasing the model for free doesn't have ongoing cost for the company. Providing cheap tokens is very expensive - specially if you don't have access to the latest transistor node chips. So I think the parent comment is right, there's something else at play allowing DS and Xiaomi to offer these nearly free tokens.
National security, training data
> how/why are they lowering the prices so much
Like I responded to someone else:
- Cheap electricity - Cheap, domestically produced GPUs - Efficiency research. (a lot of it from Deepseek's research)
Also, the Chinese government wants the AI to be as accessible as EVs so everyone will use it.
That's deliberate. US AI companies have no chance of recouping even fraction of their valuations.
PS: Have not tried this but Deepseev4 Flash (not even Deepseekv4 Pro version) with set to "high" has pretty much Claud Opus 4.7 level of capabilities and is lightening fast and dirty cheap. Hours and hours of conversation barely costs few cents.
DeepSeek Flash on high (not max) is a freak of nature indeed.
Very disproportionate intelligence-to-cost ratio.
I'm leveraging this temporary anomaly and using it as my coding workhorse.
I am very happy with DSv4 for their price/performance but neither of them are comparable to Opus.
But they're overall a good thing for us consumers even if we'll never use these models, it forces the prices down all around.
I have been using DeepSeek API within Claude Code. So far it has been legitimately superior to Claude, and Codex that I used before.
These and the Deepseek ones that were were cost reduced recently are perfectly capable models for the vast majority of light work and more.
It's funny thinking the US companies are hiking prices and Chinese ones do the opposite, it's obviously an strategy, but pretty funny
How are these "capacity constrained" Chinese companies running inference without Hoppers and Blackwells ?
Huawei Ascend AI Accellerators. DeepSeek V4 model architecture was optimized for Chinese hardware.
They can (not entirely sure how 'grey' market this is) either have subsidiaries outside of china (eg: singapore) that provide the inference and/or just rent it off the public gpu clouds.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/us-tech-execs-smuggled-nvidi...
Making their own NPUs for inference probably, you don't have to buy NVidia for inference. Google doesn't.
I worked part time with MiMo 2.5-pro over the last month, and barely managed to use 500 Million of the 700 Million tokens I had allocated.
My plan was just upgraded to 38 BILLION tokens per month. That's at least 10X the tokens I've used in my entire agentic development so far.
I should probably downgrade my plan, but we'll see. :)
Did you not get 38B units? And a token = 2.5 unit (cache hit) or up to 600 unis (cache miss)
Yep. I also got stupefied after I logged in and saw how many tokens they stuffed into my account...
"The api pricing for mimo-v2-pro and mimo-v2-omni remain unchanged" could we presume this means the discount isn't from hardware improvement or availability ?
interesting/funny: their off-peak rates apply 00:00-08:00 Beijing time, so nine-to-five for someone on the NA west coast :p
China has a population of 1.4B, US is 349M. 0-8 Beijing time is their off-peak? How is that funny, that's literally how timezones work?
It's funny, in a good way, because their off-peak times match perfectly the werstern peak demand.
How realistic is this:
Chinese models incidentally slurps up some terms that lead them to finding unflattering words that you wrote about the CCP in a random journal entry, or maybe a social media csv export. You go to China one day and are denied entry due to what you said.
Realistic or no? (yes i know the us is getting bad in re. to what you write online as well)
Models hosted in China are a siren call that I don't feel bad about resisting.
This statement makes no sense, because you literally said the "US is getting bad". We already gave up all of our data, if you wrote something about the CCP you should already expect they know about it.
This may be true about any models hosted by others than you.
At least the Xiaomi models are open weights and you can host them yourself, avoiding such concerns.
Well, at least for the Chinese models you can run them locally vs. the US models that requires you to go through their servers. But to answer your question:
> How realistic is this:
Completely unrealistic unless you are a high value target (journalist, spy, business man, etc...)
https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-french-scien...
> CBP denies travelers entry because of anti-Trump comments
China won't deny entry for anti-Trump comments, guess I'll use MiMo
China also won't deny entry for anti-Israel comments, so even more reason to use MiMo.
You're projecting the US doing this with criticism of Trump and Israel on China, when there's no proof of China ever doing something like this.
Will try MiMo now. I have been mainly using just DeepSeek lately because of the fact that V4-Flash destroys basic work for basically 0 cost. Haven't exceeded even 50% of my OpenCode Go weekly limits using V4 Flash and Pro.
The 99% is with regards to cached inputs. It seems to now at the same price as deepseek v4-pro
Everyone already said what I wanted to say. That all US companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, MS Copilot) have increased price recently while Chinese companies (Deepseek, Xiaomi) are reducing price.
The question is how they are managing to do so? They are supposed to struggle due to chip sanctions.
Secondly, why now? The US companies were supposed to subsidize too but now they are unable to keep up. Everyone going to usage based pricing, so it's unsustainable for them. They are well funded too.
If there are genuine hardware breakthrough reducing compute needs then that is good for the whole world I believe.
Competition I guess, they must be burning some resources to make this price reduction happen...
So exactly same as deepseek 4 api pricing
VSCode + Cline + Mimo v2.5 pro works ! great !. Give it a try.
Everyone adding "Permanent" to price cuts now
Can't be mistaken for someone like, ugh... Anthropic and OpenAI...
This sort of pressure will force them to though.
I hope so, but I don't know if they are in a position where they can offer these kinds of prices. They are already struggling with not losing a lot of money with their models, while chinese models can be independently hosted by inference providers at a profit already. We need to drive these prices down so AI doesn't become a thing for the few who can pay for expensive subscriptions.
First Deepseek, Now Xiaomi. A price cut of 99%.
This is why Anthropic wants these chinese AI models banned as they are in the lead in the AI race to zero and they know that there is no modal moat.
So don't tell Dario.
OK. Google was just killed. How is it possible to reduce the price by 99%??????? This is crazy
- Cheap electricity - Cheap, domestically produced GPUs - Efficiency research by many phDs. (many AI companies used Deepseek's research though)
Industrial Chinese electricity costs is similar to that of Texas, It's 8-9cents a kWh. The only benefit is industrial China decides to put millions of solar panels down, so "peak" sunlight hours can drop electricity costs significantly since their rates are highly dynamic.
Add to that home made inference chips and dirt cheap RAM from CXMT
State backed loss leaders.
Is that worse than VC-backed loss leaders? :)
The rest of the best of the business is paying for it
Like I said. China doesn't care about money. We want AI in people's hands.
I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo). I think the government probably wants actually-useful AI that could be put into chips and actually revolutionize factory work or mining or whatever. Large, SOTA models are not gonna change factory work but extremely efficient and optimized models may
Every industry-wide scale technological revolution has happened because government funded a technology and then opened it up to the masses. Just look at your iPhone: GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't)
Economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a great book about this called The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
> I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo)
I really don't think China cares about that. Chinese government's governance logic is making everything so cheap that everyone can get and use it. They did it with EVs and other things. Now they are doing it with the AI.
They do want to see the American bubble burst, this is the quickest way