Deepseek · MIT Technology Review
Three reasons why DeepSeek’s new model matters
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On Friday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited new flagship model.
Key facts
- For V4-Pro, DeepSeek charges $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens, a fraction of the cost of comparable models from OpenAI and Anthropic
- V4-Flash is even cheaper, at about $0.14 per million input tokens and about $0.28 per million output tokens, making it one of the cheapest top-tier models available
- In a 1-million-token context, V4-Pro uses only 27% of the computing power required by its previous model, V3.2, while cutting memory use to 10%
- On the major benchmarks, according to results shared by the company, DeepSeek V4-Pro competes with leading closed-source models, matching the performance of Anthropic’s Claude-Opus-4.6, OpenAI’s
Summary
V4 marks DeepSeek’s most significant release since R1, the reasoning model it launched in January 2025. DeepSeek has kept a relatively low profile since then—but earlier this month, it effectively teased V4’s release when it added “expert” and “flash” modes to the online version of its model, prompting speculation that the updates were tied to a bigger upcoming release. While the company has become a powerful symbol of China’s AI ambitions, its big return to cutting-edge frontier models comes after months of scrutiny—including major personnel departures, delays to previous model launches, and growing scrutiny from both the US and Chinese governments. So, will V4 shake the AI field the way R1 did?