alt Hacker NewsThe timing looks like they are trying to take the wind out of Qwen's sails by releasing this on the same day that Qwen released the weights of Qwen3.8-max. Or maybe it's coincidence...
For comparison I looked at Qwen's claimed benchmarks for Qwen3.8-max (https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8). Assuming each published set of benchmarks is believable, it looks like v4 Pro 0813 is better on average but overall performance is comparable. Pro 0813 is much cheaper. If you don't need vision capabilities then you don't have much reason to use Qwen3.8-max.
- 43.6 on HLE (Presumably without tools). Pro 0813 is a little worse.
- 86.6 on Terminal Bench 2.1. Pro 0813 is better.
- 55.9 on NL2Repo. Pro 0813 is better.
- 27 on Agent's Last Exam. Pro 0813 is a little worse.
- 72.5 on Toolathon-Verified. Pro 0813 is better.
- 56.6 on DeepSWE 1.1. If the DeepSWE listed for Pro 0813 is the same version, then Pro is better.
- 27.3 on AutomationBench. If the AutomationBench (Public) listed for Pro 0813 is the same, then Pro is better.
I guess we do need to wait to see if the upcoming DS pricing increase is enough to change the value proposition. As it is now, they could double or triple prices and it still would be a better value to use DS. I bet they know that.
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Official pricing only kinda matters for an open weight model, no?
I mean at the rate of model releases happening, I think a lot of these will collide more often than expected!
By that standard, the release of Grok 4.6 was also timed on the same day.
Given how I think DeepSeek operates... I think they just release it when they feel it's ready, and don't even seem that concerned with what other people are doing.