DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro

neugls

Waiting to use it

oefrha

Source is apparently a banner announcement on https://platform.deepseek.com/usage . Had me searching for a couple minutes...

swiftcoder

If they can keep up this cadence of Flash leap-frogging the previous Pro, we're in for a good time

tarruda

Hopefully it will be open weights and have the same architecture and size as the current v4 flash vision, which is probably the best LLM that can be run on 128G devices.

nickweb

Via nitter: https://xcancel.com/JustinGorya/status/2097287080128708930 Looks like the new model can be used if summoned via the API but the API won't list it.

igleria

v4 pro was decent then a better cheaper faster model comes now? As a consumer I feel like hansel and gretel combined, deepseek could be the witch.

nicce

> In keeping with our commitment to user responsibility, following the official launch of V4.1 Flash and prior to the release of V4.1 Pro, all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price. If you encounter any issues during your comparative testing between V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash, please do not hesitate to reach out to us with your feedback. Thank you for your support! Wow. Imagine OpenAI/Google/Anthropic doing this! Nope.

thrownaway561

I will continue to be amazed by how much power you get from DeepSeek Flash for the cost. I have let that puppy lose on so many projects and it is has never let me down. It can build and entire Rails app in no time and even do the tests. For most things, I don't get why people pay the money for Claude. DeepSeek Flash is my default agent in Omarchy.

EbNar

Since a few months, I almost exclusively use the Chinese "flash" models for my needs. They are a joy and they cost pennies per answer. Great job.

postalcoder

I hope DeepSeek takes some time to improve their tuning for reasoning effort. Right now, there are only three reasoning efforts: low, high, and max. For all intents and purposes, "low" is pretty much the same as turning reasoning off, and "high" is similar to "max". "High/max" performs way too much reasoning, takes forever, and causes costs to balloon. They need a proper "medium" setting. I get it that they're probably focused on pushing performance right now, but the ergonomics of the model aren't great.

jiehong

Sounds nice! But, the web ui chat version of flash has very poor language following abilities in my experience: You may ask it something in English, and get a thinking chain in Chinese with an answer in Chinese, or an English thinking chain and an English answer. Using the retry button on the same question has a 50/50 chance of any of those results. Sometimes, asking something in English, but where information are mostly in another language may make the answer in the language where data has been found. The other day, I asked something about a local German thing, in English, and I got an answer in German instead. It’s as if all the language data stirred it away from the language of the user’s question.

hinow

But what no one mentions is that the price is going from a starting point of $0.16 to $0.60, so basically they're charging nearly four times as much.

tensegrist

In keeping with our commitment to user responsibility, following the official launch of V4.1 Flash and prior to the release of V4.1 Pro, all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price. just in terms of user perception when selling this sort of service, this is what they call a "good look"

indigodaddy

So, will it have vision? (based on deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp ?)

a-ve

I've been using deepseek-v4-flash as a "worker" model with Claude Code to implement a tool using Rust/Iroh for my personal use, and it works fairly nicely when I use Opus as the planner/reviewer model. It seems to follow the plan generated by Opus, albeit with a few misses here and there that it cleans up later after being reviewed by Opus. Fairly excited for the v4.1 launch. Input cache hit prices have been halved, which looks nice.

ThouYS

if this beats GLM 5.3 flash, I am sold

NitpickLawyer

It's interesting that this is the third lab to find problems with larger models. Earlier last year oAI was rumoured to have failed their large pretrain. Now google has problems with their pro series, and ds just announced the same. There are some rumours on chinese forums talking about problems with the pretraining phase, so this is not mid/post training related. I wonder if this comes from using the bad architecture scaled up (and it hits some limits) or if this is a data problem (undertrained? bad data? bad pre-processing using smaller models?)...

simonw

> all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price If I'd carefully tested and optimized prompts against Pro I wouldn't be keen on this particular news. I feel like API model providers should lean towards not swapping out models on their paying customers, no matter how much "better" the new model is meant to be.

edude03

I've been watching a bunch of bycloud on YouTube recently, and although he's done a great job reviewing papers from the big AI labs, I feel like I'm missing something - how have all the labs seemingly made a model that's cheaper, faster AND has better performance? Historically `flash` variants (like codex spark as well) have been faster but perform worse

stanac

My problem with V4 flash is output limit. When I need to write or rewrite a larger file (~1000 lines of code) it will fail with message like output limit reached.