> The hardware to run deepseek is still incredibly expensive.

Deepseek API pricing is very low compared to Anthropic/OpenAI API pricing.

For many, the 300% difference in pricing may be difficult to justify, if the quality difference is very small. And there will be many tasks where the most expensive/the best model, is not needed. Currently many people end up using Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 for many tasks without thinking about it.