price-war

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.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% three weeks after launch and said the cut was funded by Sol rewriting OpenAI's own production kernels. The coverage called it a blink at China. The better story is who did the optimizing — and what it means when a model becomes a line item on both sides of its own P&L.