DeepSeek ships V4 Flash with strong agent scores and low API prices
DeepSeek's open-weight model undercuts rivals on API price, while third-party tests put its max-reasoning version near the top of its class.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: Simon Willison's Weblog
Why it matters
Agent products can burn through tokens on reasoning and tool calls. DeepSeek is cutting that variable cost while keeping the weights available for independent deployment.
DeepSeek, founded by Liang Wenfeng, released DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 on July 31st, pairing an MIT-licensed model with API prices low enough to change the cost assumptions behind coding agents and other token-heavy software.…
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