The AI inference price improvements have been consistent but the surprise from Deepseek is that this latest push was not by OpenAI or Meta.
Google Gemini Flash 2.0 is lower cost per million tokens and gives faster answers than Deepseek.
OpenAI o3-mini has competitive pricing. It higher on input but output is twice as expensive.
Those who are building AI data centers and training models know that AI will continue to get much better and cheaper. The expectation is the demand for really good AI will increase despite cost improvements. There is energy efficiency and design choices that Deepseek has highlighted. They optimized coding by directly accessing the hardware of Nvidia GPUs. There are many companies exploring FPGA hardware encoding of logic.