DeepSeek launches V4.1-Flash and retires V4-Pro, its flagship model

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DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on Thursday. It is a smaller model that the company says beats its own flagship on coding and agent tasks, at a lower price. The Hangzhou lab announced it in a thread on X and published the weights on Hugging Face under the MIT licence. That lets anyone download, modify and run it.

The launch comes with a notable retirement. From 04:00 UTC on 14 September, DeepSeek will send every request made to V4-Pro, its top model, to V4.1-Flash instead. Those requests will be billed at the cheaper Flash rates. That arrangement runs until a V4.1-Pro arrives. DeepSeek gave no date for it.

A big model that works like a small one

V4.1-Flash has 552 billion parameters in total. It uses only a small slice of them for each piece of text. DeepSeek calls the design a “causal encoder-decoder” and describes it as the smallest model in...

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