Being a bicycle geometry nerd I always look at the bicycle first.
Let me tell you how much the Pro one sucks... It looks like failed Pedersen[1]. The rear wheel intersects with the bottom bracket, so it wouldn't even roll. Or rather, this bike couldn't exist.
The flash one looks surprisingly correct with some wild fork offset and the slackest of seat tubes. It's got some lowrider[2] aspirations with the small wheels, but with longer, Rivendellish[3], chainstays. The seat post has different angle than the seat tube, so good luck lowering that.
This is an excellent comment. Thanks for this - I've only ever thought about whether the frame is the right shape, I never thought about how different illustrations might map to different bicycle categories.
I wonder which model will try some more common spoke lacing patterns. Right now there seems to be a preference for radial lacing, which is not super common (but simple to draw). The Flash and Pro one uses 16 spoke rims, which actually exist[1] but are not super common. The Pro model fails badly at the spoke pattern.
Both bikes have the drive side on the left, which is very very uncommon. That can't exist in the training data.
I think the pelican on a bike is known widely enough that of seizes to be useful as a benchmark. There is even a pelican briefly appearing in the promo video of GPT-5, if I'm not mistaken https://openai.com/gpt-5/. So the companies are apparently aware of it.
I don't think we need to compare models to Opus anymore. Opus users don't care about other models, as they're convinced Opus will be better forever. And non-Opus users don't want the expense, lock-in or limits.
As a non-Opus user, I'll continue to use the cheapest fastest models that get my job done, which (for me anyway) is still MiniMax M2.5. I occasionally try a newer, more expensive model, and I get the same results. I have a feeling we might all be getting swindled by the whole AI industry with benchmarks that just make it look like everything's improving.
Which model's best depends on how you use it. There's a huge difference in behaviour between Claude and GPT and other models which makes some poor substitutes for others in certain use cases. I think the GPT models are a bad substitute for Claude ones for tasks such as pair-programming (where you want to see the CoT and have immediate responses) and writing code that you actually want to read and edit yourself, as opposed to just letting GPT run in the background to produce working code that you won't inspect. Yes, GPT 5.4 is cheap and brilliant but very black-box and often very slow IME. GPT-5.4 still seems to behave the same as 5.1, which includes problems like: doesn't show useful thoughts, can think for half an hour, says "Preparing the patch now" then thinks for another 20 min, gives no impression of what it's doing, reads microscopic parts of source files and misses context, will do anything to pass the tests including patching libraries...
Agree with your assessment, I think after models reached around Opus 4.5 level, its been almost indistinguishable for most tasks. Intelligence has been commoditized, what's important now is the workflows, prompting, and context management. And that is unique to each model.
Try Charm Crush first, it's a native binary. If it's unbearable, try opencode, just with the knowledge your system will probably be pwned soon since it's JS + NPM + vibe coding + some of the most insufferable devs in the industry behind that product.
If you're feeling frisky, Zed has a decent agent harness and a very good editor.
How does it compare to Opus 4.7? I've been immersed in 4.7 all week participating in the Anthropic Opus 4.7 hackathon and it's pretty impressive even if it's ravenous from a token perspective compared to 4.6
To me, the important thing isn't that I can run it, it's that I can pay someone else to run it. I'm finding Opus 4.7 seems to be weirdly broken compared to 4.6, it just doesn't understand my code, breaks it whenever I ask it to do anything.
Now, at the moment, i can still use 4.6 but eventually Anthropic are going to remove it, and when it's gone it will be gone forever. I'm planning on trying Deepseek v4, because even if it's not quite as good, I know that it will be available forever, I'll always be able to find someone to run it.
No, but businesses do. Being able to run quality LLMs without your business, or business's private information, being held at the mercy of another corp has a lot of value.
But can be, and is, done. I work for a bootstrapped startup that hosts a DeepSeek v3 retrain on our own GPUs. We are highly profitable. We're certainly not the only ones in the space, as I'm personally aware of several other startups hosting their own GLM or DeepSeek models.
Completely agree, not suggesting it needs ot just genuinely curious. Love that it can be run locally though. Open source LLMs punching back pretty hard against proprietary ones in the cloud lately in terms of performance.
- To run with "heavy quantization" (16 bits -> 8): "8xH100", giving us $200K upfront and $4/h.
- To run truly "locally"--i.e. in a house instead of a data center--you'd need four 4090s, one of the most powerful consumer GPUs available. Even that would clock in around $15k for the cards alone and ~$0.22/h for the electricity (in the US).
Truly an insane industry. This is a good reminder of why datacenter capex from since 2023 has eclipsed the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the US interstate system combined...
I remember reading about some new frameworks have been coming out to allow Macs to stream weights of huge models live from fast SSDs and produce quality output, albeit slowly. Apart from that...good luck finding that much available VRAM haha
It is more than good enough and has effectively caught up with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 according to the benchmarks.
It's about 2 months behind GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7.
As long as it is cheap to run for the hosting providers and it is frontier level, it is a very competitive model and impressive against the others. I give it 2 years maximum for consumer hardware to run models that are 500B - 800B quantized on their machines.
It should be obvious now why Anthropic really doesn't want you to run local models on your machine.
Vibes > Benchmarks. And it's all so task-specific. Gemini 3 has scored very well in benchmarks for very long but is poor at agentic usecases. A lot of people prefering Opus 4.6 to 4.7 for coding despite benchmarks, much more than I've seen before (4.5->4.6, 4->4.5).
Doesn't mean Deepseek v4 isn't great, just benchmarks alone aren't enough to tell.
There we go again :) It seems we have a release each day claiming that. What's weird is that even deepseek doesn't claim it's better than opus w/ thinking. No idea why you'd say that but anyway.
Dsv3 was a good model. Not benchmaxxed at all, it was pretty stable where it was. Did well on tasks that were ood for benchmarks, even if it was behind SotA.
This seems to be similar. Behind SotA, but not by much, and at a much lower price. The big one is being served (by ds themselves now, more providers will come and we'll see the median price) at 1.74$ in / 3.48$ out / 0.14$ cache. Really cheap for what it offers.
The small one is at 0.14$ in / 0.28$ out / 0.028$ cache, which is pretty much "too cheap to matter". This will be what people can run realistically "at home", and should be a contender for things like haiku/gemini-flash, if it can deliver at those levels.
> According to evaluation feedback, its user experience is better than Sonnet 4.5, and its delivery quality is close to Opus 4.6's non-thinking mode, but there is still a certain gap compared to Opus 4.6's thinking mode.
Apparently glm5.1 and qwen coder latest is as good as opus 4.6 on benchmarks. So I tried both seriously for a week (glm Pro using CC) and qwen using qwen companion. Thought I could save $80 a month. Unfortunately after 2 days I had switched back to Max. The speed (slower on both although qwen is much faster) and errors (stupid layout mistakes, inserting 2 footers then refusing to remove one, not seeing obvious problems in screenshots & major f-ups of functionality), not being able to view URLs properly, etc. I'll give deepseek a go but I suspect it will be similar. The model is only half the story. Also been testing gpt5.4 with codex and it is very almost as good as CC... better on long running tasks running in background. Not keen on ChatGPT codex 'personality' so will stick to CC for the most part.
Their Chinese announcement says that, based on internal employee testing, it is not as good as Opus 4.6 Thinking, but is slightly better than Opus 4.6 without Thinking enabled.
That's super interesting, isn't Deepseek in China banned from using Anthropic models? Yet here they're comparing it in terms of internal employee testing.
For the curious, I did some napkin math on their posted benchmarks and it racks up 20.1 percentage point difference across the 20 metrics where both were scored, for an average improvement of about 2% (non-pp). I really can't decide if that's mind blowing or boring?
Claude4.6 was almost 10pp better at at answering questions from long contexts ("corpuses" in CorpusQA and "multiround conversations" in MRCR), while DSv4 was a staggering 14pp better at one math challenge (IMOAnswerBench) and 12pp better at basic Q&A (SimpleQA-Verified).
Its on OR - but currently not available on their anthropic endpoint. OR if you read this, pls enable it there! I am using kimi-2.6 with Claude Code, works well, but Deepseek V4 gives an error:
`https://openrouter.ai/api/messages with model=deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro, OR returns
an error because their Anthropic-compat translator doesn't cover V4 yet. The Claude CLI dutifully surfaces that error as "model...does not exist"
doesn't it get tiring after a while? using the same (perceived) gotcha, over and over again, for three years now?
no one is ever going to release their training data because it contains every copyrighted work in existence. everyone, even the hecking-wholesome safety-first Anthropic, is using copyrighted data without permission to train their models. there you go.
There is an easy fix already in widespread use: "open weights".
It is very much a valuable thing already, no need to taint it with wrong promise.
Though I disagree about being used if it was indeed open source: I might not do it inside my home lab today, but at least Qwen and DeepSeek would use and build on what eg. Facebook was doing with Llama, and they might be pushing the open weights model frontier forward faster.
I’d like somebody to explain to me how the endless comments of "bleeding edge labs are subsidizing the inference at an insane rate" make sense in light of a humongous model like v4 pro being $4 per 1M. I’d bet even the subscriptions are profitable, much less the API prices.
This is shockingly cheap for a near frontier model. This is insane.
For context, for an agent we're working on, we're using 5-mini, which is $2/1m tokens. This is $0.30/1m tokens. And it's Opus 4.6 level - this can't be real.
I am uncomfortable about sending user data which may contain PII to their servers in China so I won't be using this as appealing as it sounds. I need this to come to a US-hosted environment at an equivalent price.
Hosting this on my own + renting GPUs is much more expensive than DeepSeek's quoted price, so not an option.
Please don't slander the most open AI company in the world. Even more open than some non-profit labs from universities. DeepSeek is famous for publishing everything. They might take a bit to publish source code but it's almost always there. And their papers are extremely pro-social to help the broader open AI community. This is why they struggle getting funded because investors hate openness. And in China they struggle against the political and hiring power of the big tech companies.
And DeepSeek often has very cool new approaches to AI copied by the rest. Many others copied their tech. And some of those have 10x or 100x the GPU training budget and that's their moat to stay competitive.
For comparison on openrouter DeepSeek v4 Flash is slightly cheaper than Gemma 4 31b, more expensive than Gemma 4 26b, but it does support prompt caching, which means for some applications it will be the cheapest. Excited to see how it compares with Gemma 4.
The Flash version is 284B A13B in mixed FP8 / FP4 and the full native precision weights total approximately 154 GB. KV cache is said to take 10% as much space as V3. This looks very accessible for people running "large" local models. It's a nice follow up to the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 small local models.
I’m deeply interested and invested in the field but I could really use a support group for people burnt out from trying to keep up with everything. I feel like we’ve already long since passed the point where we need AI to help us keep up with advancements in AI.
The players barely ever change. People don't have problems following sports, you shouldn't struggle so much with this once you accept top spot changes.
I didn't express this well but my interest isn't "who is in the top spot", and is more _why and _how various labs get the results they do. This is also magnified by the fact that I'm not only interested in hosted providers of inference but local models as well. What's your take on the best model to run for coding on 24GB of VRAM locally after the last few weeks of releases? Which harness do you prefer? What quants do you think are best? To use your sports metaphor it's more than following the national leagues but also following college and even high school leagues as well. And the real interest isn't even who's doing well but WHY, at each level.
It is funny seeing people ping pong between Anthropic and ChatGPT, with similar rhetoric in both directions.
At this point I would just pick the one who's "ethics" and user experience you prefer. The difference in performance between these releases has had no impact on the meaningful work one can do with them, unless perhaps they are on the fringes in some domain.
Personally I am trying out the open models cloud hosted, since I am not interested in being rug pulled by the big two providers. They have come a long way, and for all the work I actually trust to an LLM they seem to be sufficient.
It honestly has all kinda felt like more of the same ever since maybe GPT4?
New model comes out, has some nice benchmarks, but the subjective experience of actually using it stays the same. Nothing's really blown my mind since.
Feels like the field has stagnated to a point where only the enthusiasts care.
At this point 'frontier model release' is a monthly cadence, Kimi 2.6 Claude 4.6 GPT 5.5, the interesting question is which evals will still be meaningful in 6 months.
Funny how Gemini is theoretically the best -- but in practice all the bugs in the interface mean I don't want to use it anymore. The worst is it forgets context (and lies about it), but it's very unreliable at reading pdfs (and lies about it). There's also no branch, so once the context is lost/polluted, you have to start projects over and build up the context from scratch again.
Using it with opencode sometimes it generates commands like:
bash({"command":"gh pr create --title "Improve Calendar module docs and clean up idiomatic Elixir" --body "$(cat <<'EOF'
Problem
The Calendar modu...
like generating output, but not actually running the bash command so not creating the PR ultimately. I wonder if it's a model thing, or an opencode thing.
SOTA MRCR (or would've been a few hours earlier... beaten by 5.5), I've long thought of this as the most important non-agentic benchmark, so this is especially impressive. Beats Opus 4.7 here
For flash? 4 bit quant, 2x 96GB gpu (fast and expensive) or 1x 96GB gpu + 128GB ram (still expensive but probably usable, if you’re patient).
A mac with 256 GB memory would run it but be very slow, and so would be a 256GB ram + cheapo GPU desktop, unless you leave it running overnight.
The big model? Forget it, not this decade. You can theoretically load from SSD but waiting for the reply will be a religious experience.
Realistically the biggest models you can run on local-as-in-worth-buying-as-a-person hardware are between 120B and 200B, depending on how far you’re willing to go on quantization. Even this is fairly expensive, and that’s before RAM went to the moon.
The low end could be something like an eBay-sourced server with a truckload of DDR3 ram doing all-cpu inference - secondhand server models with a terabyte of ram can be had for about 1.5K. The TPS will be absolute garbage and it will sound like a jet engine, but it will nominally run.
The flash version here is 284B A13B, so it might perform OK with a fairly small amount of VRAM for the active params and all regular ram for the other params, but I’d have to see benchmarks. If it turns out that works alright, an eBay server plus a 3090 might be the bang-for-buck champ for about $2.5K (assuming you’re starting from zero).
Was expecting that the release would be this month [1], since everyone forgot about it and not reading the papers they were releasing and 7 days later here we have it.
One of the key points of this model to look at is the optimization that DeepSeek made with the residual design of the neural network architecture of the LLM, which is manifold-constrained hyper-connections (mHC) which is from this paper [2], which makes this possible to efficiently train it, especially with its hybrid attention mechanism designed for this.
There was not that much discussion around it some months ago here [3] about it but again this is a recommended read of the paper.
I wouldn't trust the benchmarks directly, but would wait for others to try it for themselves to see if it matches the performance of frontier models.
Either way, this is why Anthropic wants to ban open weight models and I cannot wait for the quantized versions to release momentarily.
More like he wants to ban accelerator chip sales to China, which may be about “national security” or self preservation against a different model for AI development which also happens to be an existential threat to Anthropic. Maybe those alternatives are actually one and the same to him.
How long does it usually take for folks to make smaller distills of these models? I really want to see how this will do when brought down to a size that will run on a Macbook.
Weren't there some frameworks recently released to allow Macs to stream weights from fast SSDs and thus fit way more parameters than what would normally fit in RAM?
I have never tried one yet but I am considering trying that for a medium sized model.
These are more like experiments than a polished release as of yet. And the reduction in throughput is high compared to having the weights in RAM at all times, since you're bottlenecked by the SSD which even at its fastest is much slower than RAM.
I've been calling that the "streaming experts" trick, the key idea is to take advantage of Mixture of Expert models where only a subset of the weights are used for each round of calculations, then load those weights from SSD into RAM for each round.
As I understand it if DeepSeek v4 Pro is a 1.6T, 49B active that means you'd need just 49B in memory, so ~100GB at 16 bit or ~50GB at 8bit quantized.
v4 Flash is 284B, 13B active so might even fit in <32GB.
The "active" count is not very meaningful except as a broad measure of sparsity, since the experts in MoE models are chosen per layer. Once you're streaming experts from disk, there's nothing that inherently requires having 49B parameters in memory at once. Of course, the less caching memory does, the higher the performance overhead of fetching from disk.
But if it does, then in the following week we'll see DeepSeek4 floods every AI-related online space. Thousands of posts swearing how it's better than the latest models OpenAI/Anthropic/Google have but only costs pennies.
Then a few weeks later it'll be forgotten by most.
It's difficult because even if the underlying model is very good, not having a pre-built harness like Claude Code makes it very un-sticky for most devs. Even at equal quality, the friction (or at least perceived friction) is higher than the mainstream models.
If one finds it difficult to set up OpenCode to use whatever providers they want, I won't call them 'dev'.
The only real friction (if the model is actually as good as SOTA) is to convince your employer to pay for it. But again if it really provides the same value at a fraction of the cost, it'll eventually cease to be an issue.
"If one finds it difficult to set up OpenCode to use whatever providers they want, I won't call them 'dev'."
I feel the same way. But look at the llama vs llama.cpp post from HN few days back and you will see most of the enthusiasts in this space are very non technical people.
Flash: https://gist.github.com/simonw/4a7a9e75b666a58a0cf81495acddf...
Pro: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9e8dfed68933ab752c9cf27a03250...
Both generated using OpenRouter.
For comparison, here's what I got from DeepSeek 3.2 back in December: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/1/deepseek-v32/
And DeepSeek 3.1 in August: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/22/deepseek-31/
And DeepSeek v3-0324 in March last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/
1) LLM is not AGI. Because surely if AGI it would imply that pro would do better than flash?
2) and because of the above, Pelican example is most likely already being benchmaxxed.
Let me tell you how much the Pro one sucks... It looks like failed Pedersen[1]. The rear wheel intersects with the bottom bracket, so it wouldn't even roll. Or rather, this bike couldn't exist.
The flash one looks surprisingly correct with some wild fork offset and the slackest of seat tubes. It's got some lowrider[2] aspirations with the small wheels, but with longer, Rivendellish[3], chainstays. The seat post has different angle than the seat tube, so good luck lowering that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedersen_bicycle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowrider_bicycle
[3] https://www.rivbike.com/
I wonder which model will try some more common spoke lacing patterns. Right now there seems to be a preference for radial lacing, which is not super common (but simple to draw). The Flash and Pro one uses 16 spoke rims, which actually exist[1] but are not super common. The Pro model fails badly at the spoke pattern.
Both bikes have the drive side on the left, which is very very uncommon. That can't exist in the training data.
[1] https://cicli-berlinetta.com/product/campagnolo-shamal-16-sp...
at the top of the linked pages.
Model was released and it's amazing. Frontier level (better than Opus 4.6) at a fraction of the cost.
As a non-Opus user, I'll continue to use the cheapest fastest models that get my job done, which (for me anyway) is still MiniMax M2.5. I occasionally try a newer, more expensive model, and I get the same results. I have a feeling we might all be getting swindled by the whole AI industry with benchmarks that just make it look like everything's improving.
I do some stuff with gemini flash and Aider, but mostly because I want to avoid locking myself into a walled garden of models, UIs and company
If you're feeling frisky, Zed has a decent agent harness and a very good editor.
This is free... as in you can download it, run it on your systems and finetune it to be the way you want it to be.
Now, at the moment, i can still use 4.6 but eventually Anthropic are going to remove it, and when it's gone it will be gone forever. I'm planning on trying Deepseek v4, because even if it's not quite as good, I know that it will be available forever, I'll always be able to find someone to run it.
If you want to go budget corporate, 7 x H200 is just barely going to run it, but all in, $300k ought to do it.
- To run at full precision: "16–24 H100s", giving us ~$400-600k upfront, or $8-12/h from [us-east-1](https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/h100-rental-prices-cloud-c...).
- To run with "heavy quantization" (16 bits -> 8): "8xH100", giving us $200K upfront and $4/h.
- To run truly "locally"--i.e. in a house instead of a data center--you'd need four 4090s, one of the most powerful consumer GPUs available. Even that would clock in around $15k for the cards alone and ~$0.22/h for the electricity (in the US).
Truly an insane industry. This is a good reminder of why datacenter capex from since 2023 has eclipsed the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the US interstate system combined...
"671B total / 37B active"
"Full precision (BF16)"
And they claim they ran this non-existent model on vLLM and SGLang over a month and a half ago.
It's clickbait keyword slop filled in with V3 specs. Most of the web is slop like this now. Sigh.
It's about 2 months behind GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7.
As long as it is cheap to run for the hosting providers and it is frontier level, it is a very competitive model and impressive against the others. I give it 2 years maximum for consumer hardware to run models that are 500B - 800B quantized on their machines.
It should be obvious now why Anthropic really doesn't want you to run local models on your machine.
Doesn't mean Deepseek v4 isn't great, just benchmarks alone aren't enough to tell.
There we go again :) It seems we have a release each day claiming that. What's weird is that even deepseek doesn't claim it's better than opus w/ thinking. No idea why you'd say that but anyway.
Dsv3 was a good model. Not benchmaxxed at all, it was pretty stable where it was. Did well on tasks that were ood for benchmarks, even if it was behind SotA.
This seems to be similar. Behind SotA, but not by much, and at a much lower price. The big one is being served (by ds themselves now, more providers will come and we'll see the median price) at 1.74$ in / 3.48$ out / 0.14$ cache. Really cheap for what it offers.
The small one is at 0.14$ in / 0.28$ out / 0.028$ cache, which is pretty much "too cheap to matter". This will be what people can run realistically "at home", and should be a contender for things like haiku/gemini-flash, if it can deliver at those levels.
LMAO
I have no idea why you'd think that, but this is straight from their announcement here (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8bxXqS2R8Fx5-1TLDBiEDg):
> According to evaluation feedback, its user experience is better than Sonnet 4.5, and its delivery quality is close to Opus 4.6's non-thinking mode, but there is still a certain gap compared to Opus 4.6's thinking mode.
This is the model creators saying it, not me.
If its coding abilities are better than Claude Code with Opus 4.6 then I will definitely be switching to this model.
It's still a "preview" version atm.
Claude4.6 was almost 10pp better at at answering questions from long contexts ("corpuses" in CorpusQA and "multiround conversations" in MRCR), while DSv4 was a staggering 14pp better at one math challenge (IMOAnswerBench) and 12pp better at basic Q&A (SimpleQA-Verified).
That's literally what the I Ching calls "good fortune."
Competition, when no single dragon monopolizes the sky, brings fortune for all.
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
`https://openrouter.ai/api/messages with model=deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro, OR returns an error because their Anthropic-compat translator doesn't cover V4 yet. The Claude CLI dutifully surfaces that error as "model...does not exist"
Edit: it seems "open source" was edited out of the parent comment.
no one is ever going to release their training data because it contains every copyrighted work in existence. everyone, even the hecking-wholesome safety-first Anthropic, is using copyrighted data without permission to train their models. there you go.
It is very much a valuable thing already, no need to taint it with wrong promise.
Though I disagree about being used if it was indeed open source: I might not do it inside my home lab today, but at least Qwen and DeepSeek would use and build on what eg. Facebook was doing with Llama, and they might be pushing the open weights model frontier forward faster.
I’d like somebody to explain to me how the endless comments of "bleeding edge labs are subsidizing the inference at an insane rate" make sense in light of a humongous model like v4 pro being $4 per 1M. I’d bet even the subscriptions are profitable, much less the API prices.
edit: $1.74/M input $3.48/M output on OpenRouter
And we got new base models, wonderful, truly wonderful
For context, for an agent we're working on, we're using 5-mini, which is $2/1m tokens. This is $0.30/1m tokens. And it's Opus 4.6 level - this can't be real.
I am uncomfortable about sending user data which may contain PII to their servers in China so I won't be using this as appealing as it sounds. I need this to come to a US-hosted environment at an equivalent price.
Hosting this on my own + renting GPUs is much more expensive than DeepSeek's quoted price, so not an option.
Just this week they published a serious foundational library for LLMs https://github.com/deepseek-ai/TileKernels
Others worth mentioning:
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepGEMM a competitive foundational library
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Engram
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2
They have 33 repos and counting: https://github.com/orgs/deepseek-ai/repositories?type=all
And DeepSeek often has very cool new approaches to AI copied by the rest. Many others copied their tech. And some of those have 10x or 100x the GPU training budget and that's their moat to stay competitive.
The models from Chinese Big Tech and some of the small ones are open weights only. (and allegedly benchmaxxed) (see https://xcancel.com/N8Programs/status/2044408755790508113). Not the same.
input: $0.14/$0.28 (whereas gemini $0.5/$3)
Does anyone know why output prices have such a big gap?
At this point I would just pick the one who's "ethics" and user experience you prefer. The difference in performance between these releases has had no impact on the meaningful work one can do with them, unless perhaps they are on the fringes in some domain.
Personally I am trying out the open models cloud hosted, since I am not interested in being rug pulled by the big two providers. They have come a long way, and for all the work I actually trust to an LLM they seem to be sufficient.
New model comes out, has some nice benchmarks, but the subjective experience of actually using it stays the same. Nothing's really blown my mind since.
Feels like the field has stagnated to a point where only the enthusiasts care.
Gemini-3.1-Pro at 91.0
Opus-4.6 at 89.1
GPT-5.4, Kimi2.6, and DS-V4-Pro tied at 87.5
Pretty impressive
dang, probably the two should be merged and that be the link
A mac with 256 GB memory would run it but be very slow, and so would be a 256GB ram + cheapo GPU desktop, unless you leave it running overnight.
The big model? Forget it, not this decade. You can theoretically load from SSD but waiting for the reply will be a religious experience.
Realistically the biggest models you can run on local-as-in-worth-buying-as-a-person hardware are between 120B and 200B, depending on how far you’re willing to go on quantization. Even this is fairly expensive, and that’s before RAM went to the moon.
The flash version here is 284B A13B, so it might perform OK with a fairly small amount of VRAM for the active params and all regular ram for the other params, but I’d have to see benchmarks. If it turns out that works alright, an eBay server plus a 3090 might be the bang-for-buck champ for about $2.5K (assuming you’re starting from zero).
Was expecting that the release would be this month [1], since everyone forgot about it and not reading the papers they were releasing and 7 days later here we have it.
One of the key points of this model to look at is the optimization that DeepSeek made with the residual design of the neural network architecture of the LLM, which is manifold-constrained hyper-connections (mHC) which is from this paper [2], which makes this possible to efficiently train it, especially with its hybrid attention mechanism designed for this.
There was not that much discussion around it some months ago here [3] about it but again this is a recommended read of the paper.
I wouldn't trust the benchmarks directly, but would wait for others to try it for themselves to see if it matches the performance of frontier models.
Either way, this is why Anthropic wants to ban open weight models and I cannot wait for the quantized versions to release momentarily.
[0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793880
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24880
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452172
Do you have a source?
Keep an eye on https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models
Update ten minutes later: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Pro just appeared but doesn't have files in yet, so they are clearly awake and pushing updates.
I have never tried one yet but I am considering trying that for a medium sized model.
As I understand it if DeepSeek v4 Pro is a 1.6T, 49B active that means you'd need just 49B in memory, so ~100GB at 16 bit or ~50GB at 8bit quantized.
v4 Flash is 284B, 13B active so might even fit in <32GB.
V4 is natively mixed FP4 and FP8, so significantly less than that. 50 GB max unquantized.
My Mac can fit almost 70B (Q3_K_M) in memory at once, so I really need to try this out soon at maybe Q5-ish.
Note: these were just two that I starred when I saw them posted here. I have not looked seriously at it at the moment,
https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe
https://github.com/t8/hypura
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885014
https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro
OMG ITS HAPPENING
But if it does, then in the following week we'll see DeepSeek4 floods every AI-related online space. Thousands of posts swearing how it's better than the latest models OpenAI/Anthropic/Google have but only costs pennies.
Then a few weeks later it'll be forgotten by most.
If one finds it difficult to set up OpenCode to use whatever providers they want, I won't call them 'dev'.
The only real friction (if the model is actually as good as SOTA) is to convince your employer to pay for it. But again if it really provides the same value at a fraction of the cost, it'll eventually cease to be an issue.