deepseek

DeepSeek's peak/off-peak billing takes effect today: V4-Pro output up 4.5x at peak, cache-hit input up as much as 12x. It lands a fortnight after OpenAI cut Luna 80%. The price war was never a race to zero — it is convergence toward the true marginal cost of intelligence, approached from both directions at once.

Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.7 Flash, DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813, and GLM-5.3 shipped within three days of each other — and not one of them is a new base model. The frontier is advancing by post-training, harness, and serving efficiency while every next-generation base stays in the oven.

On June 16, GLM-5.2 became the leading open-weight model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 at **51**, ahead of every Google model and **3.4 months** behind the equally-capable closed model. The smallest gap on record is now **2.2 months** (DeepSeek V4 Pro). The peak was **9.8 months** in December 2024. The reasoning frontier the closed labs owned outright is now a quarter-year head start, priced in the open.

The lab that refused capital is closing a $7.4B first round at up to $59B. Why a battery maker leads it, why Tencent's check is defensive, and why Liang kept 40%.

In a three-week window, MiniMax M3, Qwen3.7-Max, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6 and Nemotron 3 Ultra all claimed the frontier. The third-party leaderboards say the gap is real and small. The marquee numbers are mostly the labs grading their own homework. And the open-weight crown carries a jurisdiction risk no benchmark measures.