DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash, says it outperforms flagship V4-Pro
Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd. today released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, the smallest model in a new architecture family.
The company said tests by multiple parties put the open-weight model ahead of its much larger DeepSeek-V4-Pro on performance, cost, speed and total runtime.
Starting Sept. 14, requests sent to V4-Pro through DeepSeek’s application programming interface will be answered by V4.1-Flash and billed at the smaller model’s rates until a V4.1-Pro version launches. V4-Flash and the experimental vision model DeepSeek shipped in August are both retired. Calls to either now land on V4.1-Flash.
V4.1-Flash is a mixture-of-experts model with 552 billion parameters, close to double the 284 billion in V4-Flash. A new causal encoder-decoder design keeps just 8 billion parameters active while the model processes a prompt and 16 billion while it generates output. Image understanding, offered only in that experimental release last month, is now built into the model itself.
