Hilarious sentence: "DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, delivering substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks." (emphasis mine)
It's a bit refreshing to read updates from an AI lab without bullshit doomerism and overwhelming sense of self-importance from shit like OpenAI and Claude.
It passed my threshold for not caring to try new models back with DS4, I use it for literally everything. Announcements of new models in the series always feel curious, because it doesn't really feel like there's much left to fix that would improve on what's already there for any task I know of.
It's a bit like obsessing over patch releases of some software after a major upgrade already solved the original problem long ago.
I have quite the opposite experience: I can do any concrete coding change with any model, but the intelligence limit just doesn't go through more complex debugging examples.
And then when I try a smart model, like Astra medium and it solves it (I had a firmware bug in my new laptop where I couldn't charge through USB-C) on the first try (altough with a repo already having lots of information about the hardware/firmware/debugging programs/traces), I realize how much time I'm losing on the few examples that the less intelligent models are just not able to debug and solve.
Also they can work in completely new domains, like Astra and Opus 5.5 starting to be able to use something like Blender. Currently they still often do horrible topology and basic UV mistakes, and the animations are really bad, but who knows where they’ll be in 5 years.
It's not that more capable models aren't possible, it's about the day to day baseline and what is actually needed. Like carrying a workstation-class laptop and its two 500W power supplies everywhere when all you run is a version of Excel so old a mid 2000s netbook would suffice. This pretty much describes my typical computing experience. Galaxy brain models sound great and all, but the problems I have involve neither attempting to cure cancer nor any plan on attempting something like that in the foreseeable future.
Speed and price. You should try the 4.1 Flash on one of the fast providers. It's pretty crazy how fast this model works, and it's great for iterative software development because you can steer it fast to where you want to go.
Seems that V4.1 Flash is quite cheap to serve. Especially how it implements the cache, meaning the cache pricing can be very low depending on how you implement it in your inference engine.
Depends on your use case. But if you do software development with a harness such as oh-my-pi, your cache rates are probably somewhere above 98%. Coralbricks has free cache reads, meaning it's much cheaper than the Deepseek API rates.
Lithosai is more expensive especially in the ultra tier. It's if you want extremely snappy and fast responses, which is important e.g. for a personal assistant where every second counts.
If you generate a lot of output, you're better off with the Deepseek API rates.
Above GLM 5.3, nice! That is a very capable model. I do wish that we will see some smaller "flash" models again though - running this one locally is tough (very costly).
By next year we will likely see GLM 5.3 level performance in Qwen 4 MoE models that can run on most higher end consumer systems.
I don't think there is a reason to care about any of it, just get a few dollars on a few openrouter or similar platforms and just use the models for now, wait for cheaper models that are good enough for you to become available for your hardware.
Sure you might never see frontier performance on consumer hardware but do you really need that though? Does anyone? And if you ever do just get a 30-day sub for that work, and cancel it.
I use Opus for planning, through API on medium thinking, it doesn't cost anything significant and the rest can be happily done with deepseek or glm flash. Using sol 6.1 for review loops at the end. All running on pi.
A very complex task tends to cost like 10$ max. It's comparable to a subscription with enormous flexibility.
Cant you run it on a pair of DGX spark? Sure it's expensive now, but at the initial retail price that was what, 8k in hardware? Not exactly unachievable
My experience running quantised models is that they look the same at first but are all noticeably worse once the context size gets beyond anything trivial.
It costs money to run serious tests. We're way past the time when you could get an idea of the new model in a couple of tricky prompts. Now I need to compare a whole resulting project to get a clear view. If someone else proves the benchmarks don't hold up in reality, then it saves us further tests.
Presumably. The current opencode slug for the model is just 'deepseek-flash' suggesting they will just update that one going forward, not keeping versions in parallel.
BTW who would have thought China would be the champion of freedom and opensource in the AI arena, while US is fighting for corporate/government control.
There are different types of freedom and China's bet is that as long as they provide enough economic freedom the public will be ok with somewhat restricted social and political one.
Yeah, I had a somewhat odd conversation with a Chinese acquaintance last year when she got to talking about how America sees China. Her point was that, "How am I not free? I can do whatever I want, go where I want, buy what I want. I can talk to you and say whatever I want; nobody is here listening to me."
The fact that she can't call Xi "Winnie the Pooh" on Douyin wasn't something that occurred to her, or maybe that she was aware of at all. I didn't ask. I don't like to get into these discussions when I'm in China.
There is no such thing as “free speech” anywhere. It’s all a spectrum and the Americans in particular are indoctrinated. It’s a red herring to distract from the real social issues. People in America have some of the worst healthcare in the world. But hey at least we have “free speech”.
OpenAI's models -- and even Google's Argon -- have particular niches where they shine. For GPT-6/6.1, it's 3D modeling; Astra is hands-down the best at making .step files, Blender files, etc. For Argon, it's natural language writing and everything that hooks up to Google, e.g. search and maps-based itinerary planning.
Anthropic and DeepSeek (+ GLM) are definitely solving coding, though!
Artificial Analysis recently released a dedicated 3D benchmark, where Astra lags behind both Opus and Sonnet 5.5 (and yes, open weight models seem to be quite far behind).
For me it's large files in Blender (in some cases >400MB), mostly, where Astra excels. I gave it a look, but I don't know if the benchmark encompasses that sort of thing.
.step files are simpler pieces of straightforward code, so it makes sense that Opus and Sonnet 5.5 do very well...
I believe these are the last sets of super-high-end models available to public (open or closed).. these companies probably will now start to withhold top-of-the-line models for themselves, governments, and their super-high-paying partners only.
Here's How Distill APT Used McKinsey's Private Access To Top Anthropic Model To Help The Chinese Keep Up With The Us Top IA Labs Despite Access Restrictions
That hasn't been the way to bet. DeepSeek and the other Chinese firms show no signs of slowing down, so if OAI and Anthropic halt releases and "pace the frontier" they'll just fall behind. (And there's a chance that high-end AI will become fully commoditized, which suits DeepSeek just fine.)
Besides, Fable 5.5 is reportedly releasing within the next few days, probably on Tuesday...
OpenAI models don’t come close to competing with deepseek in cost quality ratio. I have a $20 plus plan and I run out of my 5h limit in literal minutes, every tick of the harness is like 10% of my 5h limit.
You can in contrast get far more done with $20 worth of deepseek api spend. No comparison.
An example when using a less frequent term actually reduces specificity.
The CCP requires extensive certification for new major releases, to make sure a model doesn't do anything they don't want it to.
To get around this, Chinese labs only bump versions when they have to and usually claim it's a minor update.
Then on the other side, they're obviously trying to market to the tech crowd...
Would highly recommend it, it's IMO the only serious Western reporting about China.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Also, DS is an excellent model.
It's a bit like obsessing over patch releases of some software after a major upgrade already solved the original problem long ago.
And then when I try a smart model, like Astra medium and it solves it (I had a firmware bug in my new laptop where I couldn't charge through USB-C) on the first try (altough with a repo already having lots of information about the hardware/firmware/debugging programs/traces), I realize how much time I'm losing on the few examples that the less intelligent models are just not able to debug and solve.
https://www.lithosai.com/
https://www.coralbricks.ai/
Depends on your use case. But if you do software development with a harness such as oh-my-pi, your cache rates are probably somewhere above 98%. Coralbricks has free cache reads, meaning it's much cheaper than the Deepseek API rates.
Lithosai is more expensive especially in the ultra tier. It's if you want extremely snappy and fast responses, which is important e.g. for a personal assistant where every second counts.
If you generate a lot of output, you're better off with the Deepseek API rates.
What about "good governance"?
Does it have zero hallucinations? Does it reflect thoroughly on every single idea it uses, verifying its solidity?
I don't think there is a reason to care about any of it, just get a few dollars on a few openrouter or similar platforms and just use the models for now, wait for cheaper models that are good enough for you to become available for your hardware.
Sure you might never see frontier performance on consumer hardware but do you really need that though? Does anyone? And if you ever do just get a 30-day sub for that work, and cancel it.
Probably a pretty decent model for 90% of the usecases!
I've been doing a lot of hobby work with GLM 5.3 Flash and I can count the amount of times that I need a stronger model on two hands.
I have access to unlimited tokens at works and Opus is great but also often overkill if you know exactly what you need.
A very complex task tends to cost like 10$ max. It's comparable to a subscription with enormous flexibility.
It's a steal.
MiMo 2.6 Flash is the most capable model you can currently run on 2x Sparks without resorting to a quantised version of something.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06521
BTW who would have thought China would be the champion of freedom and opensource in the AI arena, while US is fighting for corporate/government control.
There are different types of freedom and China's bet is that as long as they provide enough economic freedom the public will be ok with somewhat restricted social and political one.
The fact that she can't call Xi "Winnie the Pooh" on Douyin wasn't something that occurred to her, or maybe that she was aware of at all. I didn't ask. I don't like to get into these discussions when I'm in China.
Anthropic and DeepSeek (+ GLM) are definitely solving coding, though!
They're all quite different tools.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/aa-3d
For me it's large files in Blender (in some cases >400MB), mostly, where Astra excels. I gave it a look, but I don't know if the benchmark encompasses that sort of thing.
.step files are simpler pieces of straightforward code, so it makes sense that Opus and Sonnet 5.5 do very well...
Here's How Distill APT Used McKinsey's Private Access To Top Anthropic Model To Help The Chinese Keep Up With The Us Top IA Labs Despite Access Restrictions
Besides, Fable 5.5 is reportedly releasing within the next few days, probably on Tuesday...
yes maybe opus 5.5 is stronger and flash is cheaper, but 6.1 strikes a good balance imo.
You can in contrast get far more done with $20 worth of deepseek api spend. No comparison.