The first wave of officials in China announced the abandonment of DeepSeek! Behind the suspension of DeepSeek by Tsinghua Luchen Technology: The founder You Yang was accused by netizens, and investors were helpless

出品 / 新浪科技（ID: techsina）

Author / Zhou Wenmeng

The first wave of companies in China to officially announce the abandonment of DeepSeek appeared.

Three days ago, DeepSeek officially announced that the theoretical cost profit margin of the online system reached 545%. Almost at the same time, Luchen Technology, an AI Infra company based on Tsinghua University, suddenly announced the suspension of the DeepSeek API access service.

In the case that DeepSeek has improved GPU utilization to the extreme and many manufacturers have accessed it, Luchen Technology's "reverse operation" is puzzling, and the remarks of its founder You Yang have been criticized by many netizens.

Sina Technology learned through the internal personnel of Luchen Technology that "a large part of the reason for this adjustment is due to cost considerations".

A number of investors and AI industry peers close to You Yang, the founder of Luchen Technology, revealed, "Although DeepSeek has open-sourced many inference components, it is difficult for third-party MaaS vendors to achieve official costs, so they can only choose to suspend access." ”

"The core of the retirement is still a cost issue"

At 17:02 on March 1, just after DeepSeek announced that the theoretical cost profit margin of the online system reached 545% and attracted widespread attention, Luchen Technology posted on the official channel, "The DeepSeek API service will be stopped in one week, and users are requested to use up your balance as soon as possible." ”

As for why the company suddenly decided to stop providing DeepSeek API services, Luchen Technology has not publicly mentioned it so far. However, through the large number of "DeepSeek Cost Rational Analysis" content released on Zhihu and other platforms after You Yang, the founder of Luchen Technology, announced the suspension of services, it can be basically concluded that the cost issue is the key to deciding to give up the provision of DeepSeek API services.

Sina Technology found that in recent days, as the founder, You Yang has a lot of thoughts about DeepSeek, mainly focusing on the following three aspects:

1. DeepSeek's latest data on the theoretical cost and profit margin of the system is 545%, which is based on the fact that a large number of users completely overload DeepSeek's App and web pages, and is not a conventional MaaS product. In order to achieve stable output with conventional MaaS, the number of machines that need to be prepared may be five times that of theory.

2. DeepSeek is the best model company in China, but the products are often disconnected, which is a fact.

3. The DeepSeek paper shows that it only takes $5.58 million to train a first-class large model, but in fact, what is announced is the cost of an experiment, and the development of a large model may require dozens of experiments, and small and medium-sized cloud vendors should not rely on reselling the DeepSeek API to lose money and make money, and then boast that their reasoning is 10 times faster.

In You Yang's public comments about DeepSeek, "high cost" runs throughout, so much so that these views are "antithetical to DeepSeek" in the eyes of most netizens.

In the communication with Sina Technology, a number of people close to You Yang said, "In fact, the purpose of You Yang's cost analysis of DeepSeek is to discuss whether a company like Luchen Technology can play the role of a third-party MaaS product service provider of DeepSeek, whether there is a profit model?" ”

You Yang's theoretical views first appeared in February. Not long after DeepSeek came out of the circle, You Yang publicly mentioned: "The training cost of DeepSeek-related models is far less low than rumored. He calculated, "If the full-blooded version of DeepSeek R1 outputs 100 billion tokens per day, the monthly machine cost is 450 million, and the loss is 400 million." ”

At that time, the remarks and data were publicly debated by Yuan Jinhui, the founder of Silicon-based Mobility, who is also a Tsinghua AI Infra start-up.

One of the people close to You Yang, M, said bluntly, "It is undeniable that the MaaS industry is indeed the place where the entire industry loses money, and the major factories and model factories are actually losing money on APIs, and what really makes money is a variety of cooperation, such as custom development or privatization." In M's view, Luchen Technology suspended DeepSeek, "the core is the cost problem, although DeepSeek has open-sourced many inference components, but these may not be all, so it is difficult for third-party MaaS to achieve official costs, Luchen Technology, as a small and medium-sized cloud MaaS organization that is also providing DeepSeek API service providers, is also facing a great cost test, so it chose to suspend the service." ”

As for why Luchen Technology suspended the DeepSeek API service, Luchen Technology has not publicly explained so far. However, Sina Technology learned through the company's user group that the company's official explanation for suspending the DeepSeek API to users is: "Due to business adjustments, Luchenyun will suspend the MAAS API service this Friday night, and the unused balance can be refunded by contacting the invoice assistant." ”

Another Luchen Technology investor and company insider also said that such a business adjustment was made "mainly due to cost considerations". The above-mentioned person reluctantly pointed out, "The essence is that the cost of providing a stable DeepSeek service is too high, and they need to back up a lot of redundant computing resources, which they can't compare with large cloud vendors in this regard, so they have to give up." ”

The advantage is gone,

Small and medium-sized MaaS merchant "瑟瑟发抖"

According to incomplete statistics, hundreds of domestic enterprises have announced their access to DeepSeek, covering popular fields such as technology Internet, cloud services, telecommunications, finance, energy, automobiles, mobile phones, and government agencies across the country.

An investor in Luchen Technology believes that the cost of providing stable access services through DeepSeek is actually not low. "Theoretically, a single user will only occupy the underlying computing power when accessing the DeepSeek model service, and will not occupy resources at other times. However, when the number of users increases, the time and frequency of access by different users are uncontrollable, which requires MaaS service providers to reserve sufficient redundant (standby) service resources, which are actually costs when not in use, and are often several times the service resources actually used. ”

"It's like I bought a faucet from you, I may sometimes use more water and sometimes use less, which is uncontrollable, you have to prepare some redundant water resources, not during peak periods, but I run out of water." The investor said, "When the official cost price of DeepSeek is getting lower and lower, if the third-party MaaS vendor cannot provide services that are close to or better than the official cost and performance, the profit margin will also be narrowed." ”

The person pointed out that "unlike small and medium-sized AI cloud vendors, large enterprises such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent have more abundant reserves of capital and computing resources, which can support the short-term losses caused by the provision of DeepSeek services; At the same time, they can also quickly attract and retain users through DeepSeek, and can make more monetization possibilities based on them. ”

Interestingly, just after DeepSeek announced last week that it would open source a series of code bases, entrepreneurs who also provide related API services based on DeepSeek publicly shouted in the circle of friends, "I can't sleep today, the company's good days are coming to an end!" ”

It can be seen that there is actually more than one small and medium-sized MaaS vendor affected by DeepSeek. As DeepSeek continues to promote the open source of a series of code bases, the technical barriers of a large number of third-party MaaS vendors are being broken, and in the process of bringing technology inclusion, DeepSeek is also subverting the business model of a large number of industry companies, so that their products and services no longer have a competitive advantage.

Source: Sina.com