DeepSeek V4

Has the "post-DeepSeek era" arrived?

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“The compute story probably demonstrates that Chinese models like DeepSeek will fall further and further behind Western counterparts.”

Finally, DeepSeek V4 is here. The Pro and Flash models are available through DeepSeek’s website, mobile apps, and API access as of April 23, and the lab has also released its technical report.

Bucking a recent trend of Chinese AI labs moving away from open source, V4 was released under the highly permissive MIT license. It performs admirably on various benchmarks and leads the pack of Chinese open models, but did not close the gap with closed models from the US, with the authors themselves admitting in the paper that V4 is “3 to 6 months behind” state-of-the-art frontier models (though we think it feels further). And as we will discuss later, while its architecture shows progress towards indigenizing the Chinese stack, the model probably still relied on Nvidia GPUs.