DeepSeek is ruthless
DeepSeek has introduced DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a new method significantly compressing the memory requirements for the KV-value cache. This innovation from DeepSeek and other Chinese labs is seen as aggressively reducing inference costs. Such advancements could pose a challenge for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, potentially making it difficult for them to recoup the substantial investments made in developing their leading models.
This report highlights DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash as a specific example of Chinese labs aggressively reducing inference costs, unlike the broader cost-reduction efforts from Western counterparts.
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PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Sep 13, 2026, 14:41 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Sep 13, 2026, 15:00 UTC
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- Sep 13, 2026, 14:41
- Ingested
- Sep 13, 2026, 15:00
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DeepSeek has published with DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash a new method that compresses the memory need for the KV-value cache very much.
I pondered about the implications of this and they are not very good for OpenAI and Anthropic.
This means that the models can have much larger contexts and serving requests will be much less memory intensive. As a result, inference gets cheaper.
Inference getting cheaper, requiring less memory and with better models means that the advantage OpenAI and Anthropic has in securing compute gets less meaningful.
It seems to me that DeepSeek and other Chinese labs are ruthlessly pushing down the cost of inference, which will make it difficult to impossible for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover all the money spent of creating their top models.