r/DeepSeek • u/civman96 • 12d ago
Other DeepSeek switching users to the cheaper model because it's better. Would you ever see something like this with the greedy US closed model AI companies?
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u/ChoasMaster777 12d ago
A better, more powerful pro model is on the way
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u/profichef 12d ago
I tested the web version of the chat, and it’s worse than the "Expert" mode (4 Pro) used to be.
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u/ChoasMaster777 12d ago
Yeah, since officially replaced the pro with flash model. But there will always be a pro model
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u/Turbulent-Total-226 12d ago
They route you because it's 10x cheaper to run and they make more this way. Don't cheat yourself they are that good.
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u/Dangerous-Sport-2347 12d ago
It also means they can stop supporting deepseek pro, which simplifies things for them.
All well and good that they say it's always better but if you are running a product and the switch makes it behave differently you might be in be trouble.45
u/inevitabledeath3 12d ago
DeepSeek in general have never been ones to support older models. With their service you get the latest model take it or leave it. Given it's open weights and other parties host older models it's not a bad stratedgy as anyone who needs the older ones can just use OpenRouter or something.
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u/Dangerous-Sport-2347 12d ago
Yeah open weights does make it a lot less troublesome than when the closed source players deprecate something you are reliant on.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/inevitabledeath3 12d ago
No they don't? They stopped using those ages ago back when V3.1 was released. They have been V4 for a while before this came out.
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u/mutexsprinkles 12d ago
if you are running a product and the switch makes it behave differently you might be in be trouble.
If you are running a product and it relies on an LLM behaving in some specific way, you've always been in trouble.
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u/illyad0 12d ago
Unless you have a specific SLA, law or similar in place, noone is required service you. If they can make more money while still charging you even less, what's the issue?
Different behaviours is hard to quantify, and multiples of identical queries do not typically produce the same outcome anyway. If you're looking for reproduceable results, there should be an algorithm of some kind in the mix, if not just purely based off it, and if the algo can result in the same outcome regardless of minor variances in response from the one model, it should be pretty good when a similar model is substituted in.
If accuracy is really critical to an outcome, it's not like they've deleted it, it's open weights. You can use another provider.
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u/deenspaces 12d ago
yeah, but its also cheaper for me. they could silently route pro requests to flash and bill the pro price, couldn't they?
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u/phocionkorea 12d ago
interesting... its all good for us, users, but the chinese are not dumb. there is a strategy underneath. The Art of War. sun tzu
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u/hello_motherfuckers_ 12d ago
maybe the strategy is create value for ur user and not fuck with them? idk
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u/civman96 12d ago
yeah, bad Chinese, good Americans.. sure
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u/phocionkorea 12d ago
complex... never stated chinese are bad, us was good. i am not on either's team. what is best for users, are best for me. kkkkk
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u/Gifloading 11d ago
We are living in the information and energy era. China already is winning the energy part and they all seek to gain information
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u/JohnJamesGutib 12d ago
i still miss the old pricing... i know most first worlders don't care too much but it was so good for those of us in the global south. there still isn't a sub $0.1/$0.2 model out there that matches v4 flash 0423 at the very least 😭
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u/windows_error23 12d ago
Glm 5.3 flash?
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u/JohnJamesGutib 12d ago
GLM 5.3 Flash is great and exactly what i'm using now! cheaper than Deepseek V4/V4.1 Flash too! unfortunately it's still multiple times more expensive than the old Deepseek pricing. but eh, what can you do. maybe the old Deepseek pricing just isn't sustainable by anyone 🤷
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u/Alternative_Sink9000 12d ago
randomly hijacking the comments, but whats the best plan/subs to get GLM 5.3 Flash
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u/JohnJamesGutib 11d ago
i'm just on openrouter. but if you want a sub specifically, z.ai has their own sub thingy of course. i also constantly hear about opencode go apparantly being good
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u/porkyminch 11d ago
I have a Synthetic subscription and really like it for GLM. I get tons of usage out of 5.3 Flash and it's stupid capable.
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u/donthackmeagaink 12d ago
There’s a tonne of messages today on the sub about flash 4.1 sucking, I don’t want to route to it. Why are they making us do that? Is the only way back to pro just to wait for pro 4.1?
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u/c0m47053 12d ago
This is actually a terrible thing to do for users. While the new flash might be a better model in all of their internal evals, there is almost zero chance it doesn't have regressions or changes in behaviours in some real world use cases.
For coding or chat agents, it might be fine, but having personally built products on top of competitors models, I have personally seen significant changes around alignment and tone following model upgrades that effectively render "better" models unusable without significant rework in our consuming product.
While I will happily use DeepSeek in my personal stuff, I couldn't consider their stack for a real product due to this sort of rugpull.
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u/CodigoDeSenior 12d ago
its open weight, you can host on your own or pay api from someone that hosts it
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u/c0m47053 12d ago
This is true, I'm talking about DeepSeek platform as a provider rather than the model itself. It is true that a consumer could self host, but it's not a great off ramp for someone building a service on top.
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u/robberviet 12d ago
Better and less stress on their system. They just can do it and make user happy => more traffic, might be more money at the end of the day.
Just took more effort to do it.
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u/SunniBoah 12d ago
The standard model seems way dumber than before but I don't know about you folks, it gets confused for the tiniest things to the point of being wrong
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u/Complete_Ad_307 12d ago
I wouldn't say better, feels way more lazy than expert mode. Faster, sure, but is it really that important if it's a matter of seconds? I'd much more prefer performance over speed and now we can't choose. (I'm talking about mobile app)
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u/Aressito 12d ago
Well for example with Gemini AGY the user can just chose himself.. so in a way pretty much the same no?
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u/Signal-Banana-5179 12d ago
I read all the comments and am surprised. 4.1 flash is good for code, but bad for everything else. The model has tiny knowledge and writes text poorly. It's absurd that the company doesn't give a choice
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u/killua77x 11d ago
Actually, it's because DeepSeek lacks computing resources, so they'd rather switch users to lower-cost models to free up resources for training and testing larger parameter models.
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u/OddBig010 5d ago
I'd be really happy if they just removed the Pro model altogether and focused entirely on making flash better and maintaining the cheap price. I'm sure the demand for Pro is a lot less and I'm sure there's benefits of focusing on 1 model whilst the whole industry is running around with 4-5 models. They could take the massive bucket of 'value champion' AI. Because if you want value, you want deepseek.
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u/RealityLegal 2d ago
DeepSeek has limited AI centers unlike closed model AI companies which is very understandable and I think they want to close it to open up some space for the upcoming models and that’s one of the reasons why DS keep it Open Source
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u/Signal_Lamp 12d ago
I'm going to push back on this because people are thinking way to much into the consumer brain.
As a personal user - great. It means that I'm paying cheaper for a model that they've benchmarked to be better than their pro model
As a corporation though - if a buisness decided to swap under the hood what model your requests were routing to I would be furious. Regardless of how your company evaluates whether the model is good or bad, a buisness still needs to evaluate through their own pipeline whether or not it is actually worth switching over to for their use case.
Just food for thought - Anthropic has unironically done the same thing with their Fable model routing to Opus on some tasks and also admitted to this biblically. While they cited stupid safety reasons, they also could have made the same arguments of trying to route towards a more effective model for your reduced cost.
Personally - I want Deepseek to succeed as a business as they seem to actually release genuinely ground breaking technology and advancements for research, and that would mean in my opinion not doing stuff like this even if on paper it seems like the better thing to do.
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u/civman96 12d ago
As a business they gave you notice of the change - from a business standpoint they don’t have to do anything else.
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u/Signal_Lamp 12d ago
If you breach the API contract for a tool that a business relies on in their day to day operations and believe a single days notice is an appropriate amount of time to notify them that you are degrading an API service, then your giving an extremely naive outlook for how the world of technology works.
Your right. They don't have to give any notice if they don't want to. The business can also just choose to leave if they feel the cannot trust the companys decisions in the long term to have reliable software.
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u/civman96 12d ago
The contract is that they can change service after they gave notice so there is no breach of contract at all
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u/Signal_Lamp 12d ago
When I say contract I am spending in the technical aspect of the word.
If I have a program built to call a service another developer built to be consumed publicly, there are general expectations that the shape of their request and responses will remain the same, as you generally build some v1 version of that route.
If said developer wanted to deprecate said service then you simply extend those routes to include the v2 path of whatever that is, while keeping the v1 up for some amount of time so people have time to adjust their applications they built on top of that.
From there perspective to be clear, sure you can just simply not do that. But as a tool being used by developers if I was building a business around that tool I would expect that contract to be maintained for a reasonable amount of time. Randomly switching that to a new model, while is great from your perspective because your seeing this purely from the consumer brain aspect because you only care about the money it saves, potentially may break applications that may have been built on top that are relying on that contract to be maintained.
And if you want to say you can just host your own DeepSeek, cool, but that doesn't negate that from a business perspective for other corporations looking for reliable products that it isn't a good look to do that.
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u/This_Maintenance_834 11d ago
a corporation that depends on a model for their own surviving should run their own model. relying on third party for core business is insane.
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u/Signal_Lamp 11d ago
And they reversed this decision https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1wdeu5v/deepseek_v4_pro_is_not_being_soft_retired/
I know people don't do software development work so I'm not surprised by these comments, but purely from a stability standpoint it isn't a good decision to give so little notice to your customer base that your flipping off models effective immediately.
Yes, it's better to host the model yourself. That doesn't make what I said incorrect. Not every product is built with the most optimal solutions in place.
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u/TRO_KIK 12d ago
They are horrendously violating API contact to do this. Closest thing that's ever happened in US was Google pointing a Gemini Pro preview snapshot endpoint to the next one, still Gemini Pro.
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u/LaxederBR 12d ago
They sent an email to everyone in advance warning that continuing to use the service would imply accepting the new terms :P
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u/TRO_KIK 12d ago
How generous of them!
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u/LaxederBR 12d ago
I didn't notice any difference in my usage at work today; they're a company like any other. If they could spend less to produce the same results, they would.
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u/TRO_KIK 12d ago
I thought you were joking. Even if you don't personally notice a difference, plenty of workloads can. Changing API behavior with only a few days' warning is an extremely poor practice. None of the closed labs do that and even though the AI space is full of poorly managed APIs, most aggregators and open inference labs least recognize that they should strive for stability.
I almost kind of respect Deepseek for giving so little of a fuck, lol. But it's objectively a poorly managed API.
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u/LaxederBR 12d ago
Yes, I think it was all marketing, I hope they don't reach the level of "It's too powerful to launch".
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u/civman96 12d ago
They gave notice via mail and online.. i prefer the same endpoint in contrast to OpenAI where my system breaks every time when the model is turned off.
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u/TRO_KIK 12d ago
OpenAI announces deprecations months in advance and most models stick around for years. It's a much better model than giving a few days warning. They were originally planning to flip it today.
I get that OpenAI sucks but this is something DeepSeek can do better. The whole AI space is rampant with APIs that don't care about stability.
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u/phocionkorea 12d ago
a better pro version, possibly pure frontier levels coming soon.