DeepSeek previews new AI model that ‘closes the gap’ with frontier models

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released two preview versions of its newest large language model, DeepSeek V4a long-awaited update to last year’s V3.2 model and accompanying R1 reasoning model that took the AI ​​world by storm.

The company says that both DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro are special combination models with context windows of 1 million tokens each — enough to allow large codebases or documents to be used in messages. The expert mixture approach involves activating only a certain number of parameters per task to reduce the inference cost.

The Pro model has a total of 1.6 trillion parameters (49 billion active), making it the largest open weight model available, surpassing Moonshot AI’s Kimi K 2.6 (1.1 trillion), MiniMax’s M1 (456 billion), and double DeepSeek V3.2 (671 billion). The smallest, V4 Flash has 284 billion parameters (13 billion active).

DeepSeek says both models are more effective and efficient than DeepSeek V3.2 due to architectural improvements and have almost “closed the gap” with the current leading models, both open and closed, in reasoning criteria.

The company claims its new V4-Pro-Max model outperforms its open source peers on benchmarks and outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on some tasks. In coding the competition benchmarks, DeepSeek said the performance of both V4 models is “comparable to GPT-5.4”.

However, the models seem to lag slightly behind state-of-the-art models in knowledge tests, especially OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Google’s latest Gemini 3.1 Pro. This lag suggests a “developmental trajectory that lags state-of-the-art frontier models by about 3 to 6 months,” the lab wrote.

Both V4 Flash and V4 Pro only support text, unlike many of their closed-source counterparts, which offer support for understanding and creating audio, video, and images.

It’s worth noting that the DeepSeek V4 is much more affordable than any model available today. The smaller V4 Flash model costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, undercutting the GPT-5.4 Nano, Gemini 3.1 Flash, GPT-5.4 Mini and Claude Haiku 4.5. The larger V4 Pro model, meanwhile, costs $0.145 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens, also undercutting the Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.4.

The launch comes a day after the US accused China Steals IP of US AI Labs on an Industrial Scale Using Thousands of Proxy Accounts. DeepSeek itself has been accused by Anthropic and OpenAI of “distilling,” essentially copying, their AI models.