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.
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.
Electricity in China are much, much cheaper than in U.S.
Also, DSv4 has access to Huawei Ascend GPUs that have native FP4 that allows all-native FP4+FP8 mixed compute that is more efficient than emulated FP4. Less so for 3rd party providers.
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.
China knows tourists are not Chinese; that's why when you visit China your non-Chinese SIM card silently bypasses the Great Firewall when you use roaming data.
Besides, the Chinese government doesn't really care about individual criticisms, even in public, especially in languages other than Chinese. What they really care about censoring is attempts to organize collective action. They don't care about personal opinions stated in the blog posts of tourists, let alone diary entries.
I really like the US model of free speech, at it's best. It feels natural and right to me. It would be cool if Chinese people had stronger freedom of political speech— I'd love to hear Chinese people publicly share their thoughts online without restraint or censorship; it's a huge country with a lot of smart people with diverse opinions.
But maybe you should go visit China sooner rather than later, tbf. It's friendlier and weirder and more interesting than you think, including w/r/t the censorship regime.
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.
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.
"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 ?
Insane. 3 points behind opus on the artificialanalysis index.
Mimo cost ~$400 at the old price, so about $40 today.
Opus cost ~$5000
That's over 100x cheaper, and just 3 points behind.
I can't wait to experiment with an llm consortium of 100 deepseek and mimo models.
Crazy times.
Shut up and take my m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ data!
Edit: Gemini on google search told me I could write strikethrough text on hn using <s>. Mimo told me it was unsupported and then went on to list some tags that are supported, like <b>bold</b>. I tried copy pasting the word in strikethrough from a word processor but it lost the format. I ended up using mimo in an agent shell wrapper to produce it, and copy pasting from the terminal worked for some reason.
I had a subscription before the price was cut down; the model kept randomly looping the with same character (burning 30% of the budget in one shot), and the overall performance for agentic purposes is, simply put, terrible.
It finds non-existing bugs and randomly removes chunks of code to fix them, then even presents it as an "extra fix".
Maybe it's a good generalistic model; I haven't tested it in that regard.
MiniMax (currently 2.7) which is a ~270B model tuned exclusively for agentic purposes, performs so MUCH better; it's more reliable and cheaper. Both are still far away from Opus 4.7 that I'm using at work. IMO benchmarks are just a very rough estimation; everyone cheats as much as they can get away with. Test the model yourself; do not make any assumptions based on the benchmarks.
I would love to see specialized, cheaper, bleeding-edge models like MiniMax for other non-agentic purposes as well. Why pay $1 for a general model when, for example, you can pay $0.1 for a content-moderator model that you actually need?
similarly for me, MiniMax is kind of horrible that it somewhat regularly fall into loops that I had to save it from. DeepSeek & MiMO rarely got stuck. wonder how you get completely reversed experience.
I did develop my own agent around MiniMax. I did see weird behavior when I messed up the loop, like omitting pieces of remove thinking; maybe it's an agent bug, some models/providers just ignore/normalize the broken input, some don't.
So I tried the $16/mo token plan. Burned through 31% of monthly budget in one 1-2h session of a small C project refactoring, saw some not great behavior (hey subagent, read me back these 6 files exactly - which probably burned a lot of output tokens) and will cancel, obviously.
This is waaaaay more constrained than even Claude Pro plan, let alone Deepseek V4 or Kimi K2.6 pricing.
as someone from the 3rd world - this is pleasant - even 3rd world countries will have affordable "A.I" access via Chinese models.
as someone who now lives & has lived in the west for the majority of their adult life - yeah the US western models r fucked n the crazy valuations of the A.I labs - which also filters down to the economy - since all money instead of being put to productive use is being wasted on this shit. hell electricity bills are up - cz datacenters need power. the current crooks in power don't believe in clean energy.
You can use Codex as an orchestrator and claude code via mimo/deepseek api as executor. I've read this a lot before but when you really try it, it is really something in the way you can stretch your credits.
From their docs "After using 10M input (cache miss) tokens of MiMo-V2.5-Pro, it is equivalent to consuming 3000M Credits, and you can still enjoy 1100M Credits of MiMo-V2.5". So it's around 12M input credit vs Earlier 60M tokens.
Hot take: The reason this is happening is because the market for Chinese AI models hosted by Chinese companies is struggling. Even the market for Chinese AI models hosted by western companies is soft: During the week of May 18, OpenRouter processed 3.4T DeepSeek v3 Flash tokens (their most popular model). Google has announced that Gemini is processing 746T per week; Claude is probably processing more. And the Chinese models were already staggeringly cheap, far cheaper than most Gemini, Claude, or GPT models, before this recent array of pricing changes.
Broadly: No one is using the Chinese AI models. Everyone, globally, everywhere, including in China, is using the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The models from the Big Three western labs represent >80% of all tokens processed and likely >95% of all revenue.
They aren't aiming companies but users which many have no common sense and grant these agentic AI access to everything.
All the restrictions the US imposed to CH, will be reverted back and it will be even worse, because now the data is not reaching the US gov ( we all know they have access to US big techs data ) but CH.
I really hope this goes viral and breaks Nvidia/OpenAI.
38 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadThis 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.
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. :)
It's funny thinking the US companies are hiking prices and Chinese ones do the opposite, it's obviously an strategy, but pretty funny
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.
Also, DSv4 has access to Huawei Ascend GPUs that have native FP4 that allows all-native FP4+FP8 mixed compute that is more efficient than emulated FP4. Less so for 3rd party providers.
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.
Besides, the Chinese government doesn't really care about individual criticisms, even in public, especially in languages other than Chinese. What they really care about censoring is attempts to organize collective action. They don't care about personal opinions stated in the blog posts of tourists, let alone diary entries.
I really like the US model of free speech, at it's best. It feels natural and right to me. It would be cool if Chinese people had stronger freedom of political speech— I'd love to hear Chinese people publicly share their thoughts online without restraint or censorship; it's a huge country with a lot of smart people with diverse opinions.
But maybe you should go visit China sooner rather than later, tbf. It's friendlier and weirder and more interesting than you think, including w/r/t the censorship regime.
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.
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.
Mimo cost ~$400 at the old price, so about $40 today. Opus cost ~$5000
That's over 100x cheaper, and just 3 points behind.
I can't wait to experiment with an llm consortium of 100 deepseek and mimo models. Crazy times.
Shut up and take my m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ data!
Edit: Gemini on google search told me I could write strikethrough text on hn using <s>. Mimo told me it was unsupported and then went on to list some tags that are supported, like <b>bold</b>. I tried copy pasting the word in strikethrough from a word processor but it lost the format. I ended up using mimo in an agent shell wrapper to produce it, and copy pasting from the terminal worked for some reason.
MiniMax (currently 2.7) which is a ~270B model tuned exclusively for agentic purposes, performs so MUCH better; it's more reliable and cheaper. Both are still far away from Opus 4.7 that I'm using at work. IMO benchmarks are just a very rough estimation; everyone cheats as much as they can get away with. Test the model yourself; do not make any assumptions based on the benchmarks.
I would love to see specialized, cheaper, bleeding-edge models like MiniMax for other non-agentic purposes as well. Why pay $1 for a general model when, for example, you can pay $0.1 for a content-moderator model that you actually need?
This is waaaaay more constrained than even Claude Pro plan, let alone Deepseek V4 or Kimi K2.6 pricing.
as someone who now lives & has lived in the west for the majority of their adult life - yeah the US western models r fucked n the crazy valuations of the A.I labs - which also filters down to the economy - since all money instead of being put to productive use is being wasted on this shit. hell electricity bills are up - cz datacenters need power. the current crooks in power don't believe in clean energy.
From their docs "After using 10M input (cache miss) tokens of MiMo-V2.5-Pro, it is equivalent to consuming 3000M Credits, and you can still enjoy 1100M Credits of MiMo-V2.5". So it's around 12M input credit vs Earlier 60M tokens.
Broadly: No one is using the Chinese AI models. Everyone, globally, everywhere, including in China, is using the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The models from the Big Three western labs represent >80% of all tokens processed and likely >95% of all revenue.
you could equally say, in the last complete week openrouter processed more deepseek tokens than any other provider including google
that also would not tell you much about how many tokens are used on deepseek
They aren't aiming companies but users which many have no common sense and grant these agentic AI access to everything.
All the restrictions the US imposed to CH, will be reverted back and it will be even worse, because now the data is not reaching the US gov ( we all know they have access to US big techs data ) but CH.
I really hope this goes viral and breaks Nvidia/OpenAI.
that has been the model of software since, like, ever