DeepSeek v4

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/thinking_mode

No BS, just a concise description of exactly what I need to write my own agent.

Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency. It runs entirely on Huawei chips. In other words, Chinese ecosystem has delivered a complete AI stack. Like it or not, that's a big news. But what's there not to like when monopolies break down?

Pretty cool, I think they're the first to guarantee determinism with the fixed seed or at the temperature 0. Google came close but never guaranteed it AFAIK. DeepSeek show their roots - it may not strictly be a SotA model, but there's a ton of low-level optimizations nobody else pays attention to.

Back in Nov 2025, Opus 4.5 (80.9%) was the first proprietary model to do so.

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

Model was released and it's amazing. Frontier level (better than Opus 4.6) at a fraction of the cost.

Flash: https://gist.github.com/simonw/4a7a9e75b666a58a0cf81495acddf...

Pro: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9e8dfed68933ab752c9cf27a03250...

Both generated using OpenRouter.

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.

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

"Due to constraints in high-end compute capacity, the current service capacity for Pro is very limited. After the 950 supernodes are launched at scale in the second half of this year, the price of Pro is expected to be reduced significantly."

So it's going to be even cheaper

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

    bash({"command":"gh pr create --title "Improve Calendar module docs and clean up idiomatic Elixir" --body "$(cat <<'EOF'
    Problem
    The Calendar modu...

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.