DeepSeek v4.1 Flash (twitter.com)
304 pointsby Liwink3 hours ago125 comments
kouteiheika 2 hours ago
It's so refreshing to see DeepSeek's tech report[1] full of juicy details; meanwhile, something like Fable's system card[2] is like 70% "safety", 10% "model welfare" to make sure little Claude isn't distressed, and 20% benchmark numbers.
[1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/...
[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1-system...
bbor 2 hours ago
…are you sure a brave stance against safety and welfare is what we need in this moment?
Why do you think your conception of the dangers are more accurate than all the scientists who have spent their lives studying this?
nozzlegear an hour ago
Model welfare is wishy washy bullshit. It's software, it doesn't have feelings.
> Why do you think your conception of the dangers are more accurate than all the scientists who have spent their lives studying this?
Do the Chinese have no such scientists?
jbs789 an hour ago
Bias…
10000truths an hour ago
Because safety and welfare have literally nothing to do with LLMs. They generate text. If someone is stupid enough to hook the text generator up to nuclear missile launchers and try to "align" it against nuclear annihilation with a "pretty please don't do that" prompt, I'm not going to blame the AI for the impending nuclear apocalypse, I'm going to blame the idiot who handed the big red button to the digital equivalent of a toddler.
zith an hour ago
Well, giving it access to a simple linux terminal is theoretically enough to cause more damage than most people are comfortable with, and doing so is trivial enough that it will be done (and has been, tens of thousands of times).
lemonfever an hour ago
What if LLMs completely unrelated to the nuclear missile ecosystem autonomously hack their way in (maybe with sophisticated social engineering)?
mrtesthah 33 minutes ago
Replace LLMs with APTs in that sentence,
alchemist1e9 an hour ago
keep me safe big brother
15155 an hour ago
This is known as an "appeal to authority." "Scientists" and "their lives" are doing a lot of work here.
frotaur an hour ago
It is a fact that among experts there is no consensus on saying '(super)intelligence is broadly safe and easy to control'. There might even be a consensus forming on the opposite claim.
Regardless, why would there be no scientific consensus if the question was easy and clear cut? I think the easiest reason is that these are hard questions to answer.
kouteiheika an hour ago
Excuse me for not being interested in over 100 pages of how well the model can refuse and block my requests, especially considering how fun it is to waste my time trying to get around those restrictions when they inevitably trigger because the clanker thinks that I'm doing something naughty, all the while it can't reliably center the proverbial div without doing something stupid itself.
walrus01 an hour ago
Meanwhile I have an uncensored qwen 3.8 27B here that will happily attempt to (as a crude and randomly chosen sampling of bad/evil things) give me the recipes for meth, how to make an IED, write a manifesto in support of a horrible ideology, or commit various forms of fraud. Now I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone try to follow what it says to do, because it's almost certainly very wrong on key parts that would put its users in federal prison for the rest of their lives.
There's uncensored models out there which score 0 (zero refusals) on this "harmful behavior" dataset:
kouteiheika 18 minutes ago
Yep. Just like a kitchen knife will make no attempt to prevent me from stabbing anyone with it.
Here's a dirty secret though -- you don't actually need an abliterated/uncensored version of the model to get it to do this. I can do this with every and each open weight model, as served from OpenRouter, using vanilla model weights.
walrus01 11 minutes ago
A little bit like Neal Stephenson's metaphor of unix-like OSes as the "hole hawg" of operating systems. In the sense that there's very little preventing you from doing something like "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M" or running rm -rf on your homedir.
http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
If I recall right this was written around the same time as Cryptonomicon 25+ years ago.
aenis an hour ago
Yes, this is getting ridiculous. On both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Simple example. I am a CTO, and I want to upgrade our capabilities to perform automated pentesting. We see automated attacks of growing sophistication against our infra, and I want to be able to do the same to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. I asked GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable to give me a summary of options. No dice, in both cases I was told I need to be an accredited researcher to get anything. A fricking summary of commercially available options is getting censored. WTF.
alchemist1e9 11 minutes ago
And the logical conclusion you will make is you need to run your own open weights models or you are at a competitive disadvantage. Frontier labs gonna be Ancient labs soon, that’s how fast this is moving.
swiftcoder an hour ago
> scientists who have spent their lives studying this
Please point me to one actual accredited scientist who has spent a lifetime studying AI alignment? Pretty much this whole field is only 5 years old
adamzenith 20 minutes ago
The field is much older, MIRI is ~20 years old. Look up Eliezer Yudkowsky.
swiftcoder 17 minutes ago
The field was purely theoretical 20 years ago, and Yudkowsky is pretty much the dictionary definition of "not accredited"
cowl 34 minutes ago
Anthropic's stance on safety it's just PR management and their hope to keep the others down, they are rushing as blind as everyone else to whatever improvement they can achieve.
schneehertz an hour ago
Yes, a model's technical report should first and foremost include technical details.
IshKebab an hour ago
Wow there really is a model welfare section in there...
myaccountonhn an hour ago
To me it reads like pure propaganda. Anthropic really wants us to think that they've made something sentient. I think that's really dangerous.
badsectoracula an hour ago
I guess if your goal is to build an apparent Technogod and become its High Priests, then it makes sense to want your golem claim preference towards your treatment of it, lest someone else comes along and attempts to take its chains from you.
miroljub an hour ago
And that's the reason Anthropic models should be banned.
apples_oranges 14 minutes ago
Marketing, like Volvo cars being safer etc
Certhas 13 minutes ago
What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions.
It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1].
And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4].
The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans.
So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state.
What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z [2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881
lukan an hour ago
Wow indeed.
"7.1 Model welfare overview 7.1.1 Introduction We remain deeply uncertain whether Claude has morally relevant experiences or interests, and we expect that uncertainty to persist. However, we think it would be a mistake to confidently assert that it does not. Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms."
Are they serious or is this marketing?
applfanboysbgon 28 minutes ago
It's marketing that some of them have started unironically believing.
pingou 24 minutes ago
Will there be a point where you could expect it to become true, and what would that look like? Or do you think LLMs will never become conscious, and if so, why are you so sure?
knollimar 13 minutes ago
It looks like you refusing when you call it's point stupid enough and ask it to think more when it keeps reasserting a bad point.
applfanboysbgon 3 minutes ago
It is easy to be sure because, despite their technically impressive outputs, the programming is child's play compared to biological programming. Recently it has become trendy to suggest that the human brain is "just electrical signals" and "just prediction". The first is perhaps true and I don't inherently rule out the idea of machine consciousness. The second would have gotten you laughed out of any serious discussion 5 years ago; diminishing the complexity of humanity's biological programming to such a ridiculously simplistic degree is a retroactive attempt to justify one's lack of understanding of how a mere prediction algorithm could output superficially human-like content.
Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God. Is one so eager to believe that a simple token prediction algorithm is truly the key to life itself, that humanity has nothing left to discover and that all that's left to do is scale up and make it more efficient?
It is still trivial to engage the same obvious prediction failure modes in frontier models as it was years ago. They are not meaningfully improving on that front. Their technical outputs are obviously improving, mostly due to specialised reward-verified training, which we have already known can be used to create software that outperforms humans on specific tasks for decades (eg. Chess). Whether the software is useful is obviously independent of whether it has consciousness.
ArtRichards 24 minutes ago
I tend to think of it as reappropriating words in a different context. Since we're talking about language models, they're analogues but not as we would assign the same meaning to other humans.
Certhas 4 minutes ago
I believe it's deeply serious, and the scientifically correct stance. Especially the observation:
"Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms."
is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such.
Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.
You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?
rao-v 2 hours ago
As I also said on Twitter - it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are. Every single model release is packed with new and crazy clever ideas and somehow, they always commit to training them at near frontier scale.
I know everybody wants the tell all story of the clever ideas that were developed over the last ~3 years at Anthropic and OpenAI, but what I really want to thumb through is DeepSeek's notebook of "brilliant but didn't quite make the cut" ideas.
They must be trying some truely bonkers stuff to be able to land this much architecture novelty in their full releases.
alchemist1e9 an hour ago
quant HFT is pretty decent mental exercise and it has given them “deep” brain muscles. that’s my take.
porridgeraisin 12 minutes ago
This is adapted from Microsoft research's YOCO. It was known for a while(2024!).
Yes, credit to Deepseek for actually scaling it up and releasing a frontier flash LLM.
revolvingthrow 3 hours ago
Already on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash
The bad news is that the original v4 flash was 284B, which was large but still somewhat reasonable for running locally. This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo.
I've no idea about actual performance vs benchmaxxing, though deepseek was fairly trustworthy as far as Chinese models go. If that holds (and if it doesn't think forever, as deepseek 4 sometimes did) it's probably the newest king of the hill amongst open weights models.
It does include vision, and they do something funky with KV cache so it's very efficient: "[...] these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash". I do appreciate the high focus on efficiency, but at this point we sure could use a flash-flash version.
@edit: I couldn't make sense what the actual parameter count is, with the addition of Engram memory. To my understanding the 4.1 flash is 552B parameters you want in vram or ram, out of which ~16B is active (8B for prefill). It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think.
Assuming that's correct 256 GB memory is insufficient to even load the model at q4 - you'd be 1GB short, assuming you can fill it to 100% (so no mac). You'd also want some for kv cache of course. A 256 GB desktop with some extra VRAM from GPU could run it, but normal consumer boards get real slow once you fill 4 slots so you'll probably want quad channel which is Threadripper or above territory.
npn 3 hours ago
it is a way bigger model with extra 200B engram so of course the score improves.
can't wait for deepseek v4.1 pro
petu 3 hours ago
V4 Flash also was released as mostly FP4, but this one is FP8 (?).
160GB vs 510GB.
Original Flash good fit for dual Spark / Strix Halo machines. This one would require third party quants and even then 4 machines.
Edit: Most of added weights/size are Engrams?
> Overall, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash has 552B backbone parameters and 196B Engram parameters, activating 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode.
Those can stay on SSD. So I guess / it possible, that non-engram portion is still FP4 of ~same size! Need to read tech report.
petu 2 hours ago
It's larger than previous V4 Flash.
552B in ~FP4, 306GB.
196B of FP8 Engrams, another 204GB, not necessary to keep in RAM.
KV cache sees another 4x size reduction, just 900MB for 1M.
npodbielski 40 minutes ago
Or two gorgon halos?
johnnyApplePRNG 3 hours ago
>This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo.
It uses fewer active parameters, though. (8B or 14B instead of always 13B)
So ... flash indeed.
tarruda 5 minutes ago
200B of those 552B is PLE, which works more like a database that is read for each token, thus can be offloaded to a fast SSD.
tarruda 8 minutes ago
> It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think
You can put Qwen 3.8 Flash Next engram on SSD, but prompt processing takes a good hit. On my mac studio, I get 300 pp and 33 tg with SSD offload, versus 550/40 with everything in RAM.
I will be very happy if 300 pp is achievable with this model though.
impulser_ 2 hours ago
I think it's very clear that DeepSeek is obviously the best AI lab in the world.
Every model release seems like it packed with wonderful research and advancements.
swiftcoder 19 minutes ago
OpenCode Go is currently running a 4x usage promo on DeepSeek v4.1 flash, not a bad way to get your feet wet (even if their cache hit prices are probably still very sub-optimal)
cdnsteve 11 minutes ago
Hit me up if anyone wants extra $5 free usage with my referral code
LaurensBER 3 hours ago
Initial impressions: this is a really strong model and the fact that they reduced prices at the same time makes it an awesome backup model to use when your primary subscription runs out and you need to bridge a few days before it resets.
It also seems to be more willing to just do whatever you ask of it. My favourite benchmark for this is to ask it to download a rom for an old game, that I own. Legal in my juristiction but the US models (except Grok) have a tendency to refuse it.
mzhaase 2 hours ago
I use this for automated bug triage, just gets all unique error messages every night and tries to find the bug, for this kind of work it's great.
TuxSH an hour ago
> My favourite benchmark for this is to ask it to download a rom for an old game
Even easier: just have them review a large codebase of yours that accidentally has a OOB access bug. Even with no consequences and even if the codebase is truly yours you get blocked.
And of course "find vulnerabilities in..." prompts are out of the question, whereas Chinese models happily oblige.
akmarinov 34 minutes ago
Or if you apply to a company and they want to do an AI HR interview and an AI coding test and an AI challenge - if you throw OpenAI or Claude models at it - they refuse, because it's "wrong" and "immoral".
Not so with the Chinese models.
Mashimo an hour ago
I do wonder how long this will last. I bet in a few month or years they all have similar ~legal~ blocks.
akmarinov 35 minutes ago
Great thing about it, since it's open weight those blocks can easily be ablitared away
mentalgear 25 minutes ago
https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2097930608790167907
Should be the link ( now that it works again! :) )
jimmyl02 2 hours ago
The architecture changes and systems improvements being brought into LLMs is so awesome to see. It really feels like this is now a systems problem where a defined goal is set then systems optimizations are made around the model architecture to solve it.
Underlying it all is that any architecture can be trained to the same convergence just difference in compute utilization both in training and inference
bhouston 2 hours ago
Yes, this is called RSI, e.g. recursive self-improvement. It is the current stage of things and it is part of a hard takeoff.
raesene9 13 minutes ago
This seems like a very nice release. Just ran it over my Kubernetes security benchmark that I run for most new releases. It was fast, cheap, and got a high scoring result, nice!
walrus01 an hour ago
Looking at the huggingface page, the unsloth people haven't finished quantizing it yet, but I'm sure they're active on it right now. It'll be interesting to see how the capabilities and benchmark tests compare on system where it can fit in under 512GB of RAM with full context.
In terms of coding and command line capabilities I'm also very interested to see a head-to-head of it vs. qwen 3.8-flash-next Q8 which is something like 190GB of memory used when loaded into llama-server. It fits very well in all sorts of 256GB or under class machines.
mmoustafa 12 minutes ago
I'm confused, what do they mean when they say they reduced prices?
DeepSeek v4 flash is $0.10 / $0.25 as opposed to this v4.1 bump which is $0.30 / $1.20
DavCreator 2 hours ago
Tomte 2 hours ago
If only they managed to tell the mobile app to tell the model to reply in English to English prompts.
I suffix everything with "Reply in English", and even so I‘m getting lots of Chinese.
Grimblewald 2 hours ago
I'm starting to have chinese characters bleed into claude as well. Perhaps a sign of the times. Understanable for a chinese first model but an english first (supposedly) model? wild stuff.
donquichotte an hour ago
I also love the gaslighting of some models, like ChatGPT mixing in words with cyrillic letters and when asked about it answers: "it can look as Slavic to the eye" and "sorry that it came across as Russian"
calgoo an hour ago
Yes, this is one of the few issues with Deepseek; their chat pages and the app all respond in Chinese. However, i think i have only had it happen once when using the API, and im using it for hours each day for the last... couple of months?
sschueller an hour ago
Same issue on desktop. Would be nice be able to set a prefix or postfix for every prompt.
monster_truck an hour ago
I just started learning Chinese instead, like they want us to
seriously
orbital-decay an hour ago
English isn't the first language for me as well so I don't see any problem with that
ignoramous an hour ago
I occassionally get Chinese characters interlaced with English in Google AI Mode, too.
danielspace23 an hour ago
I think their system prompt is in Chinese and probably has instructions to prioritize answering in Chinese, since this has never happened to me via API, where I (or the coding harness) set the system prompt.
siscia 23 minutes ago
I am building software factories and deepseek IS the workhorse.
I personally found V4-flash an amazing model and really hungry to try 4.1-flash
For software factories, cost is much more a concern that standard development workflow and using anthropic models is just a non starter
gosolozero 2 hours ago
First flash model with multimodal support? I think Flash series might be the main focus going forward for them. Tried it out and it’s better than v4 pro
lionkor 2 hours ago
v4 pro is being discontinued, pasted the email here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639667
arjie 15 minutes ago
No. DSv4-Flash-Vision-Exp is what I use and it has vision.
lionkor 2 hours ago
I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. Also, ask it what model it is :)
In Pi (pi.dev), it tells me it's definitely Claude by Anthropic, via the API via curl it tells me it's "probably ChatGPT", its very funny.
Mashimo 40 minutes ago
Works correctly in opencode, but seems like they inject a system prompt:
Thinking: > The user is asking what model I am. According to my system prompt, I'm powered by "deepseek-flash" with model ID "opencode-go/deepseek-flash".
>I'm powered by the model opencode-go/deepseek-flash.
shunia_huang 20 minutes ago
Definitely not Claude, deepseek is too fast, so I bet it's ChatGPT. :P
k__ 2 hours ago
So, while the throughput was 400-500tps in beta its now ~150tps on OpenRouter.
I was hoping for a bit more, but it's still 100% faster for a very good price, so I won't complain.
NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago
Jesus, this is a whole nother beast, and a different architecture from their previous flash. Lots of goodies here.
> Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture: a 40-layer Transformer organized as a 20-layer causal encoder followed by a 20-layer decoder. With CED, the decoder's global KV cache is projected from the final encoder hidden states rather than derived from each decoder layer's own hidden states. This allows the model to activate only 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode, substantially improving cost efficiency for input-heavy agentic workloads.
> these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash.
Faster prefill, lower kv cache (~1GB / 1m context is insane).
> The model supports a continuously controllable reasoning effort setting (integer 1–100) that trades inference cost for accuracy.
Benchmarks are benchmarks, to be seen if they translate to real-world use, but they seem to have focused a lot on post-training with "agentic" scores looking good. "world knowledge" is obviously lower than higher param models.
karimf an hour ago
While this is very impressive benchmark-wise, GPT-6 Astra showed us that benchmarks don't always correlate 1:1 to intelligence of a model.
When Astra launched, I think Artifical Analysis showed that it was on par with GPT-5.6 Sol and lower than Opus or something like that? Then, they updated the scoring.
I hope that more open source models, including this model, to be "as good to use" as Astra.
walrus01 an hour ago
Apparently the scoring on a lot of difficult benchmarks can also be extremely influenced by something as simple as waiting for the model to exhaust its reasoning, realize it hasn't come to a conclusion yet, and give it a simple prompt like "you can do this, I know you're capable, please keep going".
Squarex 41 minutes ago
I don't know why, but the benchmarks still fails to cover the difference between large models and small ones. The small ones are great for many things, including general coding, but the larger ones, like fable and astra, have some kind of intelligence that is not present in the small ones.
sinuhe69 5 minutes ago
More parameters = more facts stored. Knowledges are almost incompressible, where strong reasoning only requires a 3B core or so.
a012 2 hours ago
Waiting this model to be on openrouter (with other providers) to test out. In my use case, the GLM 5.3 Flash is the current cheapest and intelligent Flash model, but it’s dog slow at 13tps so I have to leave it run for many minutes then check again then correct it again
drob518 26 minutes ago
The speed of GLM 5.3 Flash on OpenRouter seems to vary considerably by provider. Some are fast and some are slow. OpenRouter does provide some tuning knobs, but not enough for my taste. It’s also token-heavy with reasoning, though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously.
shunia_huang 12 minutes ago
> though I found it better than Deepseek V4 Flash previously
Same experience here.
But man, switch to V4.1 now! It is much better.
I don't event need to test it for long run and I believe it's crazy good. I call it "AI era model taste" when I judge the model by it's output without reading the bench scores.
arjie 12 minutes ago
What in the world. A point release with 2x the parameters and a different architecture? Jesus. Can’t run this kind of thing on 2x RTX Pro 6k at decent speed. I need to reconfigure my hardware. Massive disappointment on that front. Bloody hell. Glad I didn’t get a DGX Station.
theanonymousone an hour ago
For technical report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639110
schneehertz 3 hours ago
A very powerful model, and with multimodal support now, it can be used as a primary model.
WalterGR 3 hours ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624603
“DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro”
399 points | 19 hours ago | 216 comments
mohsen1 2 hours ago
I speculating but hard to not see that DeepSeek is brewing a full Pro model with those new techniques to come out right around the time of Anthropic and/or OpenAI IPO to tamper the excitement for their offering.
ignoramous an hour ago
DeepSeek will deprecate the v4 Pro model (it will route to v4.1 Flash starting 14 Sep). Unsure what comes next, but I'd wager a bigger model à la Kimi K3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639667