I didn't know it was so good. That was a gut punch. But I'm pretty sure the market already priced this in. And people are rightfully concerned about the owner of the data. Anything that is concerned with social, political or financial data goes out of your country to another one and is maybe even kept as a potential weapon.

> And to the self-hosters out there, the economics of 4.1 Flash mean self-hosting is not worth it. If saving money is your goal, you will never recoup the costs.

Self-hosting is, for most enterprises, absolutely not about economics but rather about data confidentiality.

And in that regard, yes, the open-source weight models, especially the chinese ones will eat the fat closed US model's lunch big time.

Because it should be obvious to anyone with a brain now that AI is s commodity product. Today this leads a bit, tomorrow that. They're all interchangeable if we are being honest.

They are. That's what the push for regulations is

I feel like whoever wrote this doesn't use these models regularly. Deepseek v4.1 Flash is far from the pareto line. You can get the same performance for half the cost from Luna or Haiku 5.5 now, or you can get substantially improved performance at the same price with Sol 6.1 ~medium.

It did correctly make waves when it launched, but was quickly eclipsed by the deluge of american model releases, especially those competing on cost.

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash kindof sucks. I used it a bunch and it kindof sucks. I don't know if they are gaming benchmarks or what.

Luna is on par in benchmarks and my personal experience is Luna is better for what I do, and Luna is cheaper.

Comparing Deepseek 4.1 flash to Opus is just ludicrous.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/releases/comparisons?co...

Because GLM-5.3-Flash is both cheaper and better?

Also, it is willing to do legitimate work I need done which other models flag as dangerous and refuse to do. (Software testing of a DHCP server to survive bad inputs.)

Because in two weeks someone will be asking why I'm not freaking out about AlphaDolphins 0.3 Zip and then in a month FrozenMonkey 2.5 Artic.

I have used over 40B tokens and spent over $800 on DeepSeek API over the past 30 days, mostly on V4.1 Flash.

It's good, and you can do most work with this. For complex software implementation you need to split your runs into various phases, build in verification, and use subagents so that work gets another audit and repair pass from the lead agent. You can do pretty much everything then. Frontier models can do without compelx workflows, that's the difference.