DeepSeek announced on Thursday a “significant” price hike, amid surging global demand for a new ultra-cheap model, which sparked debate over how the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up has delivered powerful performance at rock-bottom prices.
Overall pricing for its application programming interface (API) services would be raised “in the near future”, with specific plans to be advised later, the Hangzhou-based company said in a statement on its developer platform on Thursday.
A “significant increase” was expected, and users should plan their usage accordingly, DeepSeek added.
The notice came a week after the release of its latest model DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, a 284-billion-parameter lightweight version of the V4 series previewed in April.