More like OpenAI is currently charging more. Since R1 is open source / open weight we can actually run it on our own hardware and see what kinda compute it requires.
What is definitely true is that there are already other providers offering DeepSeek R1 (e.g. on OpenRouter[1]) for $7/m-in and $7/m-out. Meanwhile OpenAI is charging $15/m-in and $60/m-out. So already you're seeing at least 5x cheaper inference with R1 vs O1 with a bunch of confounding factors. But it is hard to say anything truly concrete about efficiency OpenAI does not disclose the actual compute required to run inference for O1.
There are even much cheaper services that host it for only slightly more than deepseek itself [1]. I'm now very certain that deepseek is not offering the API at a loss, so either OpenAI has absurd margins or their model is much more expensive.
[1] the cheapest I've found, which also happens to run in the EU, is https://studio.nebius.ai/ at $0.8/million input.
Edit: I just saw that openrouter also now has nebius
Yes, sorry, I was being maximally-broad in my comment but I would think it's very, very, very likely that OpenAI is currently charging huge margins and markups to help maintain the cachet / exclusivity / and, in some senses, safety of their service. Charging more money for access to their models feels like a pretty big part of their moat.
Also possibly b/c of their sweetheart deal with Azure they've never needed to negotiate enterprise pricing so they're probably calculating margins based on GPU list prices or something insane like that.
