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

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 214 posts

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

#11
> 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.

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

#13
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.

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

#14
post #9

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.

It's not unprecedented given that GLM 5.3 Flash was better and cheaper than GLM 5.2.

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

#16
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.

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

#17
post #9

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.

v4 flash has been working quite well for the majority of my personal projects, with occasional v4 pro or Kimi 3 for the most complicated tasks or to check the overall project progress (when vibe coding).

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

#18
post #5

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.

Interesting, I had assumed it'd be too large to fit. What quant and context size are you running?

IQ3_XXS (~3.2 BPW). For me this is an option because my Mac studio is only used for serving LLMs, so I can afford to dedicate most of its RAM to this. I can run with 256k context and only uses ~117G, with the remaining (up to 125G which I can allocate to VRAM) being used for prompt caching and context checkpoints.

I'm making my own quants, though the Vision-Exp version is outdated and won't work on llama.cpp master branch (I built it before llama added support):

- https://huggingface.co/tarruda/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-GGUF

- https://huggingface.co/tarruda/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp-...

For the Vision-exp version, I also ran perplexity + KLD against the original MXFP4. Seems quite OK: https://huggingface.co/tarruda/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp-...

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

#19
post #15

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.

I am legitimately more excited for this release than any frontier models at this point.

I don't need a model that can invent new mathematics. I need something that is fast, cheap, and consistent. Give me that and I can build and scale.

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

#20
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.

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