DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by wg0 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #99

wg0 wrote: post #97

DeepSeek v4 Flash with high is already a really great work horse. Reliable. But this time, not only that it is better but they are reducing the price by 50% so that's great. I also find the DeepSeek models to be more precise than Claude models (last I used 4.7) in that I yet had not the occasion where model did something unintentional that I did not direct it to. EDIT: Updated percentage reduction.

Reducing the price by 100% means it’s free. I think you mean reducing the price by 50%

What I mean is that price has been effectively halved.

During off-peak hours, the unit price is reduced from $0.007 for input cache hits to $0.003, $0.22 for input cache misses to $0.15, and $0.12 for output to $0.6

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

#102

Post by pimeys » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

urieiejr wrote: post #96

pimeys wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm working in the agent industry and my god are we excited on new versions of Chinese flash models. The direct competition is Gemini Flash, and these models are much better on agentic tasks with fraction of the task price compared to Gemini. Things like oh here's a set of simple instructions for you to follow, call these tools, return this report. 20-30% of the price per task. And especially Deepseek Flash prod…

translation I make vaporware that doesnt do shit reliably and this chinese crap spouts plausible demos and spam calls more cheaply than the competition saaar

Well, it's much more than that. In general everybody's building agents now. You see these things that can help you to do things like adding things like OCR an appointment from a picture of a hand-written paper and add it to your calendar, search things from the internet, find that email with a PDF and add it to your local paperless instance.

Building an agent like this by yourself is really easy. Now, we have Gemini's subscription, OpenAI's ChatGPT subscription and all those, 20 bucks a month right?

What if you can spend that 20 bucks in tokens to do your own. And you pay 15 bucks _a year_ in tokens to run that? And you own the data, you own your code and integrations. It's really easy to do, and these flash models are _more than enough_ for simple agentic tasks.

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

#103

Post by nolok » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

Usually I would very much agree with you, but those things are not deterministic so if that's an issue for you you're probably not making the right choices.

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

#104

Post by burntpineapple » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

m00dy wrote: post #91

ricardobeat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>zero data-retention policies Yeah, that’s basically an industry-wide scam.

[dead]

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

#105

Post by tomrod » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #103

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

Usually I would very much agree with you, but those things are not deterministic so if that's an issue for you you're probably not making the right choices.

Nope, strong disagree. The model is one small part of the process harness; behaviors are usually routable with expected propensities. Unexpected model changes avoiding change management messes with monitoring and observability thresholds. Stochastic controls are a real thing when you have your distributions defined; your workflows on a new model will throw that expected prior out the window.

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

#106

Post by weego » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

You absolutely cannot consider an LLM production build number something to be pinned against as a static dependency in a product chain, so it's a non-issue.

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

#107

Post by elaus » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

gentlewater wrote: post #92

swiftcoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I finally uninstalled the app yesterday after giving it plenty of chances over several months. Yesterday, I asked it whether «DeepSeek has fixed the issue where it erroneously answers in Chinese?» and it answered in Chinese.

So you did not do what the post you replied to suggested?

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

#108

Post by gcanyon » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #103

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

Usually I would very much agree with you, but those things are not deterministic so if that's an issue for you you're probably not making the right choices.

They’re nondeterministic at a fine level, but can be “deterministic” at a more general level: e.g. you might know that one model will always return properly formatted json when asked. That might not be true of the replacement, even if it is in general “better” and cheaper.

Just the risk of such a thing means regression testing every time you update the model, and you want to be able to run that testing on your schedule rather than having it forced on you.

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

#109

Post by petu » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

KoolKat23 wrote: post #94

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

I imagine they need the compute. Can expand market share with more users for same amount of compute. But I agree with you. I have a dumb workflow that worked well with v4-flash-0731 and I suspect is directing to a newer model that now breaks it.

4.1 releases tomorrow, right now you're supposed to be served by same old model

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

#110

Post by idiotsecant » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #103

aftbit wrote: post #67

>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 Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but dep…

Usually I would very much agree with you, but those things are not deterministic so if that's an issue for you you're probably not making the right choices.

Models are not deterministic, but they do have a flavor. When that flavor changes it can change the nature of output in a way that is undesirable.

Sort of like shooting a rifle - where the bullets hit is (to some order of magnitude, no philosophizing please) non-deterministic, but different very similar rifles will group differently and need to be appropriately adjusted to hit anything.