honestly better than gemini flash

Its the ridiculous cached input token price of $0.00028/1 M

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1twesxe/comment/o...

Literal race on twitter posting to increase token throughput and drive down costs on these Chinese open source models

If all of global spend on Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini APIs just switches over to DeepSeek then easily we can decrease total AI spend by 10x

Model labs charged developers higher API prices to subsidize their own agent harness offerings. Think Anthropic charging 5x higher Claude API prices to subsidize consumer subscriptions. So Cursor in a way was subsidizing their own direct competitor.

DeepSeek V4 Flash totally inverted this relationship. Now you have a model that beats even Sonnet in some benchmarks and is totally opensourced. Now inference providers are racing to the bottom to optimize and give cheaper hosting. Every player with a non-SOTA is now racing to swap over to stop paying the big model lab tax, even Microsoft is switching Copilot to use DeepSeek.

On switching over to Deepseek:

- we noticed over a 100x cost decrease while similar or better performance then Gemini 3 Flash

- insane saving from the cached input tokens: $0.002/1 Million tokens

- both DeepSeek Flash and GLM 5.2 are text-only models, so clearly multimodal training is not worth the additional cost. Language is just a much more efficient sparse representation of the world/reasoning than vision

- we had a early bet on a text-only web agent harness, and now with DeepSeek this results in unique cost advantages.

- we rewrote our harness as a callable DSL library that a model can generate code to execute on. DeepSeek has proven phenomenal on code generation to drive an agent harness.

- I would highly recommend everyone to rewrite their harness to be text-only and callable via executable code leveraging DeepSeek V4 Flash.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680260

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

The Codex computer use functionality actually uses OS level accessibility trees, so thats also possible without screenshots.

With Retriever AI, we construct custom accessibility trees to represent web pages and just switched over to using DeepSeek v4 Flash and its nearing 100x cost decrease.

We also had great success just reverse engineering the underlying APIs of websites and then writing code to hit them. This approach of using screenshots to take actions on a webpage to trigger the underlying network calls the website is making seems too naive.

Trump administration friends get free passes on environmental laws, but anyone not pushing their narrative is getting curbstomped till they change their tune.

Come speak up against this regulatory retaliation and voice your support for Anthropic's Fable release.

We are meeting at a public plaza in front of their office to show support and discuss AI policy with free chai!

What do you think of just reverse engineering the network requests and writing scripts to hit the underlying APIs that the browser is making instead of tackling at the browser automation layer?

Maybe with the corp token spending limits and the rise of codex, Anthropic saw steep deceleration in usuage?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110288

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I embedded a Google Calendar widget on my Book a demo page, I don't know the API and Google doesn't expose/maintain one either.

What we are doing at Retriever AI is to instead reverse engineer the website APIs on the fly and call them directly from within the webpage so that auth/session tokens propoagate for free: https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/ai-subroutines-zero-token-determin...

All that matters is sociotechnological progress to be able to progress further enough to overcome these tests of existence.

We already have 25k+ users and have an opensource extension as well: https://github.com/rtrvr-ai/rover/tree/main/apps/preview-hel...

Right now since we have a custom sandbox to re-execute the code in, we are using our own syntax and exposed methods. So even now you can edit the generated script.