Depth No Longer King? DeepSeek Shrinks Layer Count, Outperforms Llama

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-08-09

A developer compared the network layer counts of major LLMs, pointing out that we have effectively stopped the "stack more layers" paradigm.

Data shows DeepSeek's layer count has steadily decreased (from 95 in V1 to 60 in V2, 61 in V3, and a rumored 43 in V4-Flash), whereas Llama-405B still sits at 126 layers. The author suggests that with current architectural advancements, raw depth matters surprisingly little now.

Original post →

More from Models

Models channel →