Relace Is Now the Cheapest DeepSeek v4.1 Flash Provider on OpenRouter

ilyasu · x · 2026-09-25

Relace is now the cheapest DeepSeek v4.1 Flash provider on OpenRouter. EBorgnia's breakdown: agent traces are 96%+ input tokens so GPU utilization is prefill-bound; DeepSeek's encoder/decoder split lets a lossier cheap submodel handle prefill without hurting decode quality, with a redesigned attention cutting KV cache 4x. Fully exploiting the gains remains a deep engineering problem DeepSeek "left as an exercise." Ilya Sutskever reshared it.

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