alt Hacker News>The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet.
It's ironic how in a thread about "AI subsidies" that people don't think free model releases from AI don't count as subsidies. Whatever AI winter that would cause AI companies to stop subsiding tokens, would probably cause other AI labs to stop doing free model releases. They might not be able to un-release the current crop of open models, but assuming proprietary model development still happens, they'll quickly go obsolete.
The currently-released models don't really go away. Even if they collectively only release a new model every few years for the sake of influence and public image, that's plenty enough to keep the competitive aspect going.