DeepSeek-V4-Flash Free, B.AI Adds Tencent Hy3

Free access to capable models is becoming a distribution tactic rather than a pricing decision, and the pairing of DeepSeek's promotion with B.AI adding Tencent's Hy3 suggests Chinese labs are competing on reach before monetization. The immediate beneficiaries are developers and smaller teams that would otherwise pay per-token for frontier-class inference. The open question is whether free tiers remain a customer-acquisition phase or become a durable layer of the market, and how that pressures paid API providers.