Model releasesOctober 17, 2026Impact
DeepSeek ships V4.1 Flash under an MIT licence
DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash, a fast, cheap model with built-in search, under the permissive MIT licence, priced at $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens via its API.
Why it matters
It resets the floor for what near-frontier coding help costs, and the MIT licence lets any company build on it commercially with almost no strings attached.
The details
- V4.1 Flash is a distilled, speed-optimised sibling of V4 Pro, generating around 180 tokens per second on DeepSeek's API.
- In our races it lands mid-pack overall but fourth in the cost-efficiency race, behind only the fast tiers from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
- Expect a wave of fine-tunes and self-hosted deployments within weeks, as happened after earlier DeepSeek releases.
Models in this story
Provenance: Lab announcement and model card; speed figures self-reported. Illustrative placeholder story.