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DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

simonwillison.net

21–30 of 420 posts

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#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 I usually don't

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#22

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…

> Bear in mind open code was also new to me so I could be just seeing thinking where I usually don't

Well there's your problem.

Edit: I remember seeing similar things with ChatGPT or Codex, although I can't remember in which context.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#23
post #9

Deepseek v4 Pro feels like Claude Opus 4.6 in it's personality but here's what I did find out about costs: I did cut loose Deepseek v4 on a decent sized Typescript codebase and asked it to only focus on a single endpoint and go in depth on it layer by layer (API, DTOs, service, database models) and form a complete picture of types involved and introduced and ensure no adhoc types are being introduced. It developed a…

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

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#24
post #18
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…

If the data is opensource on github, then in my opinion it should be fair game.

IMO this is unfair for GPL or similarly licensed code.

Seems ok for MIT like licensed code though

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#25
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…

Because they give it away for free and offer APIs at very acceptable rates. Not that hard to figure out, Robin Hood stealing our data tax back comes to mind.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#26

From the pricing page of deepseek: (3) The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC. Was this taken into account when reviewing the model?

obviously everyone subsidizes for user acquisition - after all people need to be coaxed to test your model, claude code subscriptions come to me one.

DeepSeek pro is 65/86% cheaper (i/o tokens) in subsidized pro vs pro and 91/97% cheaper with current subsidies.

Flash vs Sonnet 4.6 is 95/98%

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#27
post #25
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…

Because they give it away for free and offer APIs at very acceptable rates. Not that hard to figure out, Robin Hood stealing our data tax back comes to mind.

GitHub is free.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#28

From the pricing page of deepseek: (3) The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC. Was this taken into account when reviewing the model?

Yeah even the Chinese open models have a problem that inference costs for these aren't that cheap. The only way out for the AI bubble collapse is simply more efficient hardware at lower costs and infrastructure setup downtime.

It’s just an introduction price to speed up adoption for the rest of the month, hardly worth mentioning compared to subsidized coding plans.

We know DS runs profitable, they also indicate in their paper they expect prices to drop as they get access to the next gen Huawei cards.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#29
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…

What would be the non-subsidized price for a V4 api? Can it be priced 3x cheaper than bigger models? In Openrouter, this 1600B param model costs 0.4$. Whereas Kimi 2.6, 1000B params is 0.7; GLM 5.1, 754B params is 1.0$.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#30

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…

I see similar things using GLM 5.1 in pi.

I had to turn off thinking traces because it was just giving me anxiety looking at it.

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