The old DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has been my workhorse model for the past month (after running tests comparing w/ Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, GLM 5.3 Flash, MiMo 2.6 Flash (including the MOPD fix)) and I've run tens of billions of tokens through it and pushed it fairly hard in both private internal benchmarking and in my own workloads to figure out where it's strong/weak.

Partly because I run it on very fast local infra (200+ tok/s) and partly because I'm guaranteed it's not being changed on me, I've generally preferred it over proprietary subscription models for daily tasks, as it seems about as capable at mid-level tasks (I reserve Astra/Opus mostly for planning/review).

I've replaced the previous model with 1017, and while it's early, a few observations:

- It's CoT has changed dramatically. I find the heavy Astra distillation claims to be plausible

- It has strong benchmarks scores, and from what I've seen online it's much better at 3D games and such, but that's not so relevant for my work. On my internal evals it is more token efficient, but it actually doesn't score any higher than the previous model

- It's only been a couple days, but it does seem a bit more focused and reliable. DS4 0731 and DS4.1 have been a bit sloppy (as in not-careful, although they did tend to fall into Claudisms as well), and 1017 seems to be a bit sharper.

- I'm running it through some more challenging work, but I'm not sure if it's really at GLM-5.3 level, especially for cyber/RE/hardware poking, which GLM has excelled at.