DeepSeek releases open model V4.1 Flash, which beats the company's own flagship and costs 70% less
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A model on par with the best closed systems can now be downloaded for free and run locally — frontier SI is getting cheaper and ceasing to be the privilege of a few companies.
V4.1 Flash is a multimodal model with 552 billion parameters, of which only 8–16 billion are active per token; it has a 1 million token context and weights under the permissive MIT license. On Terminal-Bench 2.1 it scored 90.6 versus 89.1 for Claude Opus 5 and 88.8 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and in software development tasks it solved 74.2% versus 62.7% for the senior V4-Pro. Memory per token is compressed roughly fourfold compared with V4-Flash. DeepSeek announced that from September 14, requests to V4-Pro in the API will be served by the new model at a price of about $1.2 per million output tokens instead of $3.96.