alt Hacker NewsWith the performance gains they're claiming, I wonder if they implemented the Casual Encoder-Decoder technology from DeepSeek 4.1's paper.
I could see them accomplishing it and seeing gains like this in roughly the correct timeframe, and when I heard about that development I assumed the frontiers would probably jump on it.
How it works: https://miraflow.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-1-flash-causal-encoder-...
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I don't think it's particularly relevant?
They might be using something like this, or they might be using some other "increased sparsity" techniques, of which there are a great many. They also might be optimizing for something else - like less RAM use for KV cache.
Alternatively, they might be cutting into their margins and dropping the price because of stiffer competition from Astra. I do think that's unlikely though.
This model was likely trained months before deepseek released their paper.