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

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 215 posts

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

#21
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.

Same for me. DeepSeek models are incredibly good at implementation and light planning. I still default to Opus models for feature planning, but for most simple features the Pro models suffice.

Incredible good value and product they have built.

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

#22
post #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 mo…

I've hit this too, but you can just add "in English" to steer it

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

#23
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.

My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese models. This way we help them develop and improve models some day we can run them locally.

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

#24
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.

My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese mo…

These models are open-weights. Anyone can host them, you don’t have to use chinese servers even though most of them offer zero data-retention policies.

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

#25

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 probab…

I switched to GLM-5.3 flash on high for this reason. Too many "but wait" in the Deepseek-v4 reasoning.

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

#26
post #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 mo…

I'm also totally not sure why it do that, but I guess because they're searching from China and web results comeback in Chinese so the model start using that.

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

#27
post #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 mo…

I've occasionally got chinese characters in anthropic/openai's responses too, locally on codex/claude.

Hasn't happened in a while, last time was when I was testing fable 5 in june.

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

#29

    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"

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

#30
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.

My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese mo…

You're naive if you're thinking the scumbags running the US companies aren't using your data.

In any case old rules apply: if privacy is a concern don't share the data. I share all my work-related code because it's worthless, but I don't and would never share company business and process details, access to production/user data, etc.

Meanwhile I know of people connecting all the kind of MCPs for datadog/sentry/jira/concluce/production databases to their harnessess..lol.

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