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I have a pretty large, complex project I've been building with heavy AI use (new language + compiler). I was following a 'strong model as orchestrator launching cheap models as implementers' pattern, but I recently trialled just using Deepseek-V4.1-Flash as the model for both layers because of the cost savings (with mimo v2.6 flash on code review agents for some decorrelation).

I was previously using GLM-5.3 as the orchestrator, after switching to DS anecdotally there was an unnacceptable quality loss, mostly around not taking all the relevant context into account when making decisions, pulling new design out of thin air without discussion too often, and being way too wordy and rambly in documentation despite prompting to avoid it. There's a lot of docs, rulings, core concepts, design leans to uphold and DS was just not cutting it.

However, it's perfectly capable of being the sole agent for all of my well specced implementation tasks. I've gone back to GLM as the orchestrator.

Call me crazy but:

VRAM & Memory Requirements by Precision

• FP16 (Full Precision): Requires ~1,664 GB of VRAM (e.g., an 8x B300 288GB cluster).

• INT8 Quantization: Requires ~832 GB of VRAM (e.g., 8x H200 141GB).

• INT4 Quantization: Requires ~416 GB of VRAM (e.g., 8x A100 80GB)

VRAM aint cheap, Sam Altman ruined the cost of memory, Nvidia doesnt make enough consumer GPUs letting the market go insane over them, I still have friends on 1070s or 1070 TIs because GPUs have been severely overpriced for too long. I remember when a gaming PC was only $1000.

Even so why would anyone not sleep on a model they cannot run?

Oh man. v4.1-flash has been an sbolute game changer for us. We run all our Personal Assistants now on flash (thinking high) by default and it works incredibly well. There is really no need for basic agentic tasks that might require Kimi K.3 or GLM-5.3 levels.

Once its gets juicier, we let flash launch specialized subagents with specific models. GLM-5.3 for coding or Kimi K.3 for research and critique.

But as a main driver. I love flash. And it brought our bill down by A LOT :D

I think because we're all just using it thinking we have found the "model for me" and never mentioning it to anyone because what would we say? It's good. It's a bit like the Logitech MX Master, as more and more people assumed they had found the ideal mouse for their purposes, it quietly became the professional standard through sheer adoption.

I'm paying for the heavily-discounted subscriptions, not the API rates. There isn't really a cost gap for me. DeepSeek doesn't have a subscription to compare to, but when I compared the GLM 5.3 usage I got from a $100/mo Z.ai subscription compared to Opus 5.5 on a $100/mo Claude subscription, there wasn't a big gap. And GLM 5.3 is very clearly not a frontier model (deepseek v4 seemed a lot closer, but I didn't use it enough to really say for my workloads).

I don't think those subscriptions nave negative contribution margins, either. I think we're seeing a lot of price discrimination by the big labs, and huge margins on their frontier models. The fact that they have been cutting prices to their second-biggest tier of models (Opus/Sol).

Open models catching up and collapsing these margins would worry me if I were a shareholder in the big labs, but as a user, I really doubt that the western labs have bigger environmental impact just because they have higher API costs, I think they have a ton of efficiencies they aren't sharing with customers yet because demand is so high.

I had the same experience using ds 4.1 last couple of weeks. It’s insanely good for the price. I’m doing mostly web dev it excels at everything I throw at it. The pricing is ridiculous. I canceled my gpt subscription and haven’t looked back hope the pricing stays like that. I almost never need a better model. I still keep my Claude 20$ sub for now but I feel like one more iteration and I won’t need even that anymore I hardly use it

This model finally got me off my Claude Max subscription. I’ve found it superior to Opus 5.5 in certain use cases, and certainly faster.

I’m convinced that I’ll have good enough inference on my laptop at reasonable speeds within the next year.

What about MiMo v2.6 Pro? It’s throughput is slower by default (UltraSpeed is faster than DS4.1F) but is above the pareto line, and cheaper.

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

I think the interesting provider to cross-check this assumption with here is Meta, who is clearly freaking out, and is currently providing Muse 1.3 even cheaper so long as you are willing to share data with them

While using DeepSeek v4.1 Flash I was architecting a system and I made a mistake of drawing the RPC boundaries at a wrong place that did cost me in so many ways.

I realized that mistake and guided DeepSeek where it should be.

Next I fired Fabble 5.5 set to high to check if the hype is real about Fabble. It exhausted 89% of quota and came up with NOTHING that DeepSeek hadn't flagged itself already in its notes.

The question seems rhetorical but I think there are two reasons in some combination. First is it there is some awareness lag here. That lag can be on the producer and consumer side. Software enterprises are pretty slow to adopt new things and slow to try new things so they might only be aware of openai and Claude as options. Plus there are some scariness because deep seek is a Chinese model and therefore export restricted - never mind that there are American in European providers.

The other reason is more interesting. Maybe the frontier providers think that price performance is irrelevant in light of very powerful frontier models that can start the RSI loop and or a huge displacement of work and a winner take all economic situation. After all if frontier providers earn everyone's money then you won't have any money to spend on any model 100x cheaper or not.

People have been raving since forever about Deepseek, but if one looks at the CoT, it's evident that it's way way stupider than frontier models (there's a reason why it's cheap). It's laughable to compare Deepseek 4.1 with Opus 5.5.

I've benchmarked, rigorously, deepseek-v4-flash for programming and personal use, and it is definitely less smart than Qwen3.8-flash-next (which in turn, is not terribly smart).

Local models are also really slow, unless one spends insane amounts of money.

Having said that, Qwen3.8-flash-next is an impressive evolution; it reaches the small versions of the frontier models (like Sonnet) - but again, it's massively slower and not 100% reliable (including: stability).

DeepSeek isn't even on my mind. I use the frontier models and can get the best in the industry for a relatively cheap price.

There was a moment 3 months back where the sentiment was that cheaper models were the way to go. Since then the pendulum has swung back.

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 0910 is perfect for M5 Ultra 256GiB. Running it fully resident in RAM, prefill at ~2500 tok/s and decode at ~40 tok/s. Probably tons of room to improve from there.

> shrank the KV cache by roughly 437X

Can't you just say "shrank to 1/437th the size"? It's not that hard.

I'm no expert, but it think that it's the pricing on GPT-6 Luna. I'm also guessing that it's been underpriced just for this reason. I also don't think it's all that great, but it's definitely very cheap.

If it's underpriced, it's a loss leader to sell the other models, so it actually can't be too good.

I really put these things through their paces because I use them to review and work with new abstract game rules and models, so they're always flying blind. Luna misses the obvious (and more importantly, the clearly explained) consistently. My second prompt is listing all of the points in its first response, and saying "No, it doesn't work like that." The third prompt is picking out the two or three suggestions it made after correcting itself on all of the original points and saying "That's how it already works." The fourth prompt is "Now that we're done going over the rules, can we start?"

I actually feel like 5.6 Luna seemed better.

I was just using a bunch of models in Cursor to review a project. I went looking for DeepSeek and it was not one of the options.

Would be cool if they added it.

America bans Chinese models sooner or later just the China banned American big tech

What would freaking out look like, or is this just a stupid bloggish title flourish?

Is OpenAI coming in $20B under a sign of "freaking out"?

They might be. They would delay public admission as long as possible, because public admission would make stocks go down.

I don't know about "freaking out", but I'd say I'm having a good time here with DS 4.1 flash.

Is it known why unsloth seems to not have touched DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?

Because GLM 5.3 Flash is even cheaper?

I had it make 25 different things today and it cost $0.70

It’s disgustingly good value. I find it capable of doing anything I want.

Obviously can’t use it at work, but for home projects it’s awesome.

In my experience it just takes so much longer to arrive at "done" state for me. It thinks for soooooo long. I guess if you're running 12 sessions at once you don't really notice.

I would love to get them more better, it's good not a bad thing.

No they can't.

And as long as I pay as little for claude opus 5.5 i do right now, i'm using it.

But yes i'm glad that we have alternatives.

because it doesn't work very well?

if you have a legitimate coding application, it isn't very good. if you have some kind of inauthentic activity, which could be what it is trained for for all sorts of reasons...

because we've all figured out that AI is just a huge grift?

Why would we freak out? The systems we use have always gotten better, faster, cheaper with time

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Not comparing to gpt-6-luna which seems comparable and priced well.

You might also choose to pay money for a service that provides real value instead of actively choosing to support the Chinese deliberate effort to undermine this country.

For non-coding tasks it may be fine. But for coding, Opus 5.5 is just a completely another level than something like Deepseek 4.1 Flash.

Opus 5.5: TIME 9.3m COST / $1.99 / SCORE 99/100 https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/#claude-opus-5-5

Deepseek 4.1 Flash: TIME 2.8m / COST $1.89 / SCORE 72/100 https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/dev/#deepseek-v4.1...