There's no way that all AI inference providers are colluding and/or all running at a massive loss, meaning the cheap Chinese model prices must be the real cost it takes to run frontier-class models PLUS their margin.
Look at Deepseek 4 Pro. https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers
Deepseek and Baidu are subsidising prices but they probably train on inputs.
I have no model training and ZDR in OpenRouter enabled, and the first provider that shows up there is Deepinfra, significantly more expensive than Deepseek.
BUT much cheaper than Sonnet 4.6 and ChatGPT GPT-5.4.
Leaps and bounds better!
I don't think I benchmarked it.
But the experience was that it was able to find small details in PDFs, in technical diagrams, and this was really not captured well at all with OCR.
In general, OCR I think should be used more as an add-on to retrieve data, not given to the generation model itself. Similar to retrieving based off a text description and then giving the generation model the image.
For a RAG project for a client with a lot of PDFs and Powerpoints with images, I used ColPali a year ago. I see the provider ColiVara is still online but it seems to have fizzled out.
Retrieving based on text and then giving the generation model the image instead is much smarter than retrieving based on image. Image-based retrieval is slow and expensive.
Same with giving the model an image vs a structured representation of it.
Totally agree.
I've been using cheap Chinese open-source models via OpenCode Go, and they are faster, cheaper and in my experience arrive at the solution quicker because they are more pragmatic.
Yesterday Codex was making a big issue out of a new module that was upgraded in our cluster and because of which the same SSH key would be "regenerated" by Terraform. No big deal, it just truncates a newline at the end of the SSH key and it works all the same. But not being aware that this, as an example, is unimportant can cost a lot more time than using the big models saves.
https://pi.dev/packages/pi-auto-reviewer