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

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 mostly in another language may make the answer in the language where data has been found. The other day, I asked something about a local German thing, in English, and I got an answer in German instead. It’s as if all the language data stirred it away from the language of the user’s question.

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 probably focused on pushing performance right now, but the ergonomics of the model aren't great.

Source is apparently a banner announcement on https://platform.deepseek.com/usage. Had me searching for a couple minutes...

So, will it have vision? (based on deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp ?)

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.

    In keeping with our commitment to user responsibility, following the official launch of V4.1 Flash and prior to the release of V4.1 Pro, all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price.

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.

Hopefully it will be open weights and have the same architecture and size as the current v4 flash vision, which is probably the best LLM that can be run on 128G devices.

Via nitter: https://xcancel.com/JustinGorya/status/2097287080128708930

Looks like the new model can be used if summoned via the API but the API won't list it.

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.

If they can keep up this cadence of Flash leap-frogging the previous Pro, we're in for a good time

> In keeping with our commitment to user responsibility, following the official launch of V4.1 Flash and prior to the release of V4.1 Pro, all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price. If you encounter any issues during your comparative testing between V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash, please do not hesitate to reach out to us with your feedback. Thank you for your support!

Wow. Imagine OpenAI/Google/Anthropic doing this! Nope.

I will continue to be amazed by how much power you get from DeepSeek Flash for the cost. I have let that puppy lose on so many projects and it is has never let me down. It can build and entire Rails app in no time and even do the tests. For most things, I don't get why people pay the money for Claude. DeepSeek Flash is my default agent in Omarchy.

Waiting to use it

[flagged]