DeepSeek V4.1-Flash: New Architecture, Beats GPT-5.6 Sol on DeepSWE at 94% Lower Output Price
kimmonismus · x · 2026-09-10
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash just six weeks after July's V4-Flash, with a brand-new architecture:
- Architecture: Causal Encoder–Decoder with native visual understanding; 552B MoE params with 8B active during input and 16B during output. Cheaper large-input reads plus shared/compressed stored context cut memory — ideal for agents repeatedly reading code, docs, and tool results.
- Efficiency: KV-cache needs cut to ¼ (HBM) and ⅛ (SSD) of the previous generation.
- Benchmarks (DeepSeek's own tests): 74.2% on DeepSWE vs 54.4% for V4-Flash and 73.0% for GPT-5.6 Sol; matches or beats Sol on several coding/agent benchmarks.
- Pricing: -32% fresh input, -57% cached input, -9% output vs V4-Flash. Peak rate $1.20/M output tokens vs Sol's $20 (-94%), off-peak $0.60.
The author: DeepSeek is back in the price war — "this is the real moat," and weekly releases with major jumps are the new normal.
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