DeepSeek vs. Frontier Models: ~50x Token Price Gap Analyzed

DeepSeek V3 is priced roughly 50x cheaper per token than Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models, and the author argues closed-model labs are now competing on luxury branding rather than capability, mirroring how premium consumer goods manufacture scarcity. The core question is whether OpenAI and Anthropic can structurally cut prices 20–50x to match open-weight competitors like DeepSeek or Xiaomi's MiMo.