Beijing’s AGI Bar, an AI-themed bar in the Zhongguancun tech district, offers customers free access to DeepSeek’s V4 Flash model via two Nvidia workstations, allowing owner Song De to self-host the model without paying the Chinese startup. The bar, which opened last summer as a hub for developers, founders and investors, features logos of major Chinese labs and a signature drink named AGI, a glass almost entirely full of beer foam. The move comes as a new generation of cost-efficient Chinese AI pressures Silicon Valley labs to lower prices. OpenAI has slashed fees by 80 per cent for its latest lightweight model “Luna”, while Anthropic has unveiled a model approaching its most powerful system’s performance at half the price. Meanwhile, DeepSeek, whose V4 Flash tops the usage leaderboard of technical platform OpenRouter, said last week it plans a “significant increase” in prices for programmers. Technology analyst Jack Gold of J.Gold Associates noted that many tasks can be handled by older or smaller models, especially in the agentic world where models run locally. Chinese models from Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 to Alibaba’s Qwen series are gaining attention as challengers, while OpenAI and Anthropic, both preparing to go public, need to show profit, leading to price competition to attract users.