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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#31

Post by el_io »

darkoob12 wrote: post #23
EbNar wrote: 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 can use those models from Openrouter, they have many Non-Chinese providers.

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

#32

Post by _aavaa_ »

hinow wrote: post #28

But what no one mentions is that the price is going from a starting point of $0.16 to $0.60, so basically they're charging nearly four times as much.

What are you talking about? Current flash prices are 0.66 for output, this is dropping it to 0.60.

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

#33

Post by tarruda »

postalcoder wrote: post #16

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 would rather have just 3 levels: low, medium and high.

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

darkoob12 wrote: post #23
EbNar wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#35

Post by Mashimo »

darkoob12 wrote: post #23
EbNar wrote: 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…

The new meta model is fast and very cheap as well, and when used through OpenCode you get quite a lot of free tokens. But meta is also THE surveillance company, so probably also not a good choice in your case.

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

#36

Post by HansHamster »

calgoo wrote: post #17
igleria wrote: post #9

v4 pro was decent then a better cheaper faster model comes now? As a consumer I feel like hansel and gretel combined, deepseek could be the witch.

v4 flash has been working quite well for the majority of my personal projects, with occasional v4 pro or Kimi 3 for the most complicated tasks or to check the overall project progress (when vibe coding).

I must be doing something wrong. I gave v4 pro a try a couple of days ago, gave it a simple prompt like "clean up functions x and y in file z" and it would always start off promising, just to quickly get sidetracked, start hallucinating problems in the code, and just get stuck for hours until I interrupt it:

— hmm — 0x2D696370 — little-endian bytes: 70 63 69 2D = 'p','c','i','-' — hmm — WAIT — WAIT — !!!!! — *WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — *HOLD ON — HOLD ON — HOLD ON — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — !!!!!!!! — *WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — *OK — WAIT — I THINK I FINALLY SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE — I NEVER READ IT — AND — THE LAYOUT — hmm — !!!!! — *WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — WAIT — HOLD ON — HOLD ON — HOLD ON — HOLD ON

Then gave the same to Sonnet 5 and it was done 15 - 30 minutes later. I tried v4 pro both in claude code and codewhale with similar results. Haven't tried the new deepseek harness.

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

#37

Post by pimeys »

EbNar wrote: 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.

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 produces better quality than Gemini does.

Where Gemini still wins is non-text input what Deepseek cannot do, yet, and Deepseek Flash has this thing of cheaper models where a failing tool call can derail your agent to a retry loop if you're not careful on instructions in the error message.

If they fix and make the tool calls to work better in non-optimal situations, it's much easier to switch from Gemini without a few weeks of evals and bugfixing.

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

#38

Post by apexalpha »

jiehong wrote: 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 have the same issue, sometimes.

I initially thought it was a trick, that using Chinese chars is somehow more info dense and it saves tokens to 'think' in Chinese.

But later on it became more erratic. I still wonder if token reduction would work that way.

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

#40

Post by fluoridation »

tarruda wrote: post #18
fluoridation wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I had assumed it'd be too large to fit. What quant and context size are you running?

IQ3_XXS (~3.2 BPW). For me this is an option because my Mac studio is only used for serving LLMs, so I can afford to dedicate most of its RAM to this. I can run with 256k context and only uses ~117G, with the remaining (up to 125G which I can allocate to VRAM) being used for prompt caching and context checkpoints. I'm making my own quants, though the Vision-Exp version is outdated and won't work on llama.cpp master b…

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I basically have the same use case, only on Strix Halo.
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