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DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

simonwillison.net

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Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#111

Post by rsanek »

FrasiertheLion wrote: post #74
rsanek wrote: post #52

I'm not sure I'd call it "almost on the frontier," but I do think that v4 Pro is the most usable coding model I've seen out of China. I've used it via Ollama Cloud (coding) and OpenRouter (data processing). Feels Sonnet-level to me -- solid at implementation when given a specification, but falls a good bit short of Opus 4.7 max thinking when planning out larger changes or when given open-ended prompts.

Have you given GLM 5.1 or Kimi K2.6 a shot for coding? They outperform Deepseek v4 pro.

I tried Kimi K2.6 but came away underwhelmed -- it is much more expensive / slow but does not feel better to me. Haven't tried the GLM series.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#112

Post by locknitpicker »

amelius wrote: post #36
ithkuil wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even taking into account the fact that they are billing at 75% discount it's still quite cheaper

Aren't they all billing at discount?

> Aren't they all billing at discount?

Microsoft just announced the availability of OpenAI GPT-5.5, which they are charging 30x for it. In contrast, they charge 7.5x for Claude Opus 4.6 and 1x for OpenAI GPT-5.4

Check out the token-based pricing, and compare GPT-5.5 with all other models.

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#114

Post by [deleted] »

cheshire_cat wrote: post #81
cassianoleal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure that can happen but it hasn’t been my experience. I just spent a whole day using it for some pretty hefty refactors, many rounds of back-and-forths, thousands of lines of code changes, reviews, investigations, many subagents running parallel tasks, the works. Total cost $0.95, altogether. I had attempted this with Opus 4.6 in the past and it burned through the $10 budget I’d given it before it returned from my i…

Sounds promising, thanks for your report. I didn't want to say that they're not cheaper to run, artificial analysis also shows that they're cheaper. My main point was about it being important to also look at token efficiency, not only cost per token, to get the full picture.

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#115

Post by 100ms »

FrasiertheLion wrote: post #76
jdasdf wrote: post #3

I've been using v4 pro for the past few days and honestly in terms of quality it seems more or less on par with open AIs 5.4 or opus 4.6 (i havent tried 4.7) To be clear, i'm not doing state of the art stuff. I mostly used it for frontend development since i'm not great at that and just need a decent looking prototype. But for my purposes it's a perfectly good model, and the price is decent. I can't wait for open mod…

You can use Tinfoil for inference, which lets you use the model in the cloud while getting similar privacy as running locally: https://tinfoil.sh/inference . Disclaimer I'm the cofounder. This works by running the model inside a secure enclave (using NVIDIA confidential computing) and verifying the open source code running inside the enclave matches the runtime attestation. The docs walk you through the verification…

Tinfoil looks super interesting! Do you have load balancers in front of the trusted compute stack? Looked at a design like this in a different space and the options for ensuring privacy in a traditional "best practice" architecture seemed very limited

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#116

Post by dannyw »

taffydavid wrote: post #21

I tried deepseek v4 through open code at the weekend. I'm a daily Claude/Claude code user. I tried to build something simple and while it got the job done the thinking displayed did not fill me with confidence. It was pages and pages of "actually no", "hang on", "wait that makes no sense". It was like the model was having a breakdown. Bear in mind open code was also new to me so I could be just seeing thinking where…

Eh, you're seeing raw thinking tokens. With Claude 4, and I think GPT-5 series, you are no longer seeing real thinking tokens, but "summarized" tokens that are probably highly different to the raw thinking.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#117

Post by never_inline »

deaux wrote: post #14

I'm surprised that people here don't care at all about these models openly training on your data, especially if you use them straight from the model developer. Whereas things like "GitHub now automatically opts everyone into using their code for model training" get hundreds of justifiably angry comments, I never see this brought up anymore on posts like these talking about using Chinese models through OpenRouter. Thi…

I am fine with them training on my open source code (which is pretty bad but not the point, because they're providing the service for free). I will be super pissed if I pay for enterprise and they train on it though. I believe this is the opinion of majority programmers.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#118

Post by halfwhey »

naaqq wrote: post #80

DeepSeek’s official API has a cache hit rate of over 99% if you use it continuously within the same codebase for long sessions, so it’s much cheaper than frontier models. I have an example of 200M token session in claude code.

Might be a dumb question but do you have to read the files in the same order in new sessions to ensure the correct prefix for the cache?

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#119

Post by segmondy »

cheshire_cat wrote: post #69

While the cost are lower than frontier models there are two factors that make DS4 Pro and K2.6 not as cheap as they might look. For DS4 Pro there's a discount going on for the official API, which sometimes gets overlooked and mixed up in discussions. Simon uses the full price in the comparison, so that's not an issue here. The other issue is that DS4 Pro and K2.6 often use way more reasoning tokens than the frontier…

This is very false DS4 is super cheap. I would advise to begin by reading their release paper. https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...

They introduce very novel methods to improve long context efficiency and attention. HCA & mCH. It requires only 27% of flops for inference and 10% for KV cache than v3.2. This makes it super efficient. Think of this. For flops, we can now serve more than 3x the amount with the same number of compute, and you would need 30% of prior KV cache.

Furthermore, this release is a PREVIEW, DeepSeek is the real open labs and they not only cook up quite a bit with every single release, but they publish and share it. I'm running this locally.

Let me tell you how "CHEAP" this is. With v3.2 I would run out of GPU ram, spill into system ram with 256k context. It ran quite alright and I was happy with my 7tk/sec. With this, I'm 100% in GPU ram with full 1million token, run more than 2x fast while getting better results.

This is super cheap. moonshot has made it clear that they are starved for GPUs and that's why. If they had GPU capacity like we do in US and subsidized the models like we do here, they would be giving it away for free!

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#120

Post by robbs »

KronisLV wrote: post #6

I'm currently paying for Anthropic's Max subscription (the 100 USD one) and I quite often hit or approach the 5 hour limits, but usually get to around 60-80% of the weekly limits before they reset (Opus 4.7 with high thinking for everything, unless CC decides to spawn sub-agents with Haiku or something). Those tokens are heavily subsidized, but DeepSeek's API pricing is looking really good. For example, with an agent…

I’ve found that if I turn off auto mode, I get much more usage from the $100/mo plan.
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