DeepSeek v4.1 Flash • Hacker News Board

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#121

Post by Certhas » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:19 AM UTC

myaccountonhn wrote: post #69

IshKebab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow there really is a model welfare section in there...

To me it reads like pure propaganda. Anthropic really wants us to think that they've made something sentient. I think that's really dangerous.

What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions.

It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1].

And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4].

The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans.

So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state.

What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z [2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#122

Post by knollimar » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:19 AM UTC

pingou wrote: post #108

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's marketing that some of them have started unironically believing.

Will there be a point where you could expect it to become true, and what would that look like? Or do you think LLMs will never become conscious, and if so, why are you so sure?

It looks like you refusing when you call it's point stupid enough and ask it to think more when it keeps reasserting a bad point.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#123

Post by mmoustafa » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

I'm confused, what do they mean when they say they reduced prices?

DeepSeek v4 flash is $0.10 / $0.25 as opposed to this v4.1 bump which is $0.30 / $1.20

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#124

Post by porridgeraisin » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

rao-v wrote: post #20

As I also said on Twitter - it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are. Every single model release is packed with new and crazy clever ideas and somehow, they always commit to training them at near frontier scale. I know everybody wants the tell all story of the clever ideas that were developed over the last ~3 years at Anthropic and OpenAI, but what I really want to thumb through is DeepSeek's notebook of "brilli…

This is adapted from Microsoft research's YOCO. It was known for a while(2024!).

Yes, credit to Deepseek for actually scaling it up and releasing a frontier flash LLM.

Edit: the rest of this thread has become a US China infowar theory culture war. I am not of either of these countries and the above comment isnt meant to implicitly support either "side".

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#125

Post by shunia_huang » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

drob518 wrote: post #104

a012 wrote: post #19

Waiting this model to be on openrouter (with other providers) to test out. In my use case, the GLM 5.3 Flash is the current cheapest and intelligent Flash model, but it’s dog slow at 13tps so I have to leave it run for many minutes then check again then correct it again

The speed of GLM 5.3 Flash on OpenRouter seems to vary considerably by provider. Some are fast and some are slow. OpenRouter does provide some tuning knobs, but not enough for my taste. It’s also token-heavy with reasoning, though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously.

> though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously

Same experience here.

But man, switch to V4.1 now! It is much better.

I don't event need to test it for long run and I believe it's crazy good. I call it "AI era model taste" when I judge the model by it's output without reading the bench scores.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#126

Post by arjie » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

What in the world. A point release with 2x the parameters and a different architecture? Jesus. Can’t run this kind of thing on 2x RTX Pro 6k at decent speed. I need to reconfigure my hardware. Massive disappointment on that front. Bloody hell. Glad I didn’t get a DGX Station.

No wonder they retired the Pro model in favour of this.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#127

Post by cdnsteve » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #114

OpenCode Go is currently running a 4x usage promo on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, not a bad way to get your feet wet (even if their cache hit prices are probably still very sub-optimal)

Hit me up if anyone wants extra $5 free usage with my referral code

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#128

Post by walrus01 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

kouteiheika wrote: post #115

walrus01 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile I have an uncensored qwen 3.8 27B here that will happily attempt to (as a crude and randomly chosen sampling of bad/evil things) give me the recipes for meth, how to make an IED, write a manifesto in support of a horrible ideology, or commit various forms of fraud. Now I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone try to follow what it says to do, because it's almost certainly very wrong on key parts that woul…

Yep. Just like a kitchen knife will make no attempt to prevent me from stabbing anyone with it. Here's a dirty secret though -- you don't actually need an abliterated/uncensored version of the model to get it to do this. I can do this with every and each open weight model, as served from OpenRouter, using vanilla model weights.

A little bit like Neal Stephenson's metaphor of unix-like OSes as the "hole hawg" of operating systems. In the sense that there's very little preventing you from doing something like "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M" or running rm -rf on your homedir.

http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

If I recall right this was written around the same time as Cryptonomicon 25+ years ago.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#129

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

schneehertz wrote: post #36

kouteiheika wrote: post #13

It's so refreshing to see DeepSeek's tech report[1] full of juicy details; meanwhile, something like Fable's system card[2] is like 70% "safety", 10% "model welfare" to make sure little Claude isn't distressed, and 20% benchmark numbers. [1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/... [2]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1-system...

Yes, a model's technical report should first and foremost include technical details.

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#130

Post by alchemist1e9 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

aenis wrote: post #80

kouteiheika wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me for not being interested in over 100 pages of how well the model can refuse and block my requests, especially considering how fun it is to waste my time trying to get around those restrictions when they inevitably trigger because the clanker thinks that I'm doing something naughty, all the while it can't reliably center the proverbial div without doing something stupid itself.

Yes, this is getting ridiculous. On both OpenAI and Anthropic. Simple example. I am a CTO, and I want to upgrade our capabilities to perform automated pentesting. We see automated attacks of growing sophistication against our infra, and I want to be able to do the same to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. I asked GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable to give me a summary of options. No dice, in both cases I was told I nee…

And the logical conclusion you will make is you need to run your own open weights models or you are at a competitive disadvantage. Frontier labs gonna be Ancient labs soon, that’s how fast this is moving.