I don't think we need to compare models to Opus anymore. Opus users don't care about other models, as they're convinced Opus will be better forever. And non-Opus users don't want the expense, lock-in or limits.

As a non-Opus user, I'll continue to use the cheapest fastest models that get my job done, which (for me anyway) is still MiniMax M2.5. I occasionally try a newer, more expensive model, and I get the same results. I have a feeling we might all be getting swindled by the whole AI industry with benchmarks that just make it look like everything's improving.

How does it compare to Opus 4.7? I've been immersed in 4.7 all week participating in the Anthropic Opus 4.7 hackathon and it's pretty impressive even if it's ravenous from a token perspective compared to 4.6

No, the Deepseek V4 paper itself says that DS-V4-Pro-Max is close to Opus 4.5 in their staff evaluations, not better than 4.6:

> In our internal evaluation, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max outperforms Claude Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the level of Opus 4.5.

Is it honestly better than Opus 4.6 or just benchmaxxed? Have you done any coding with an agent harness using it?

If its coding abilities are better than Claude Code with Opus 4.6 then I will definitely be switching to this model.

> (better than Opus 4.6)

There we go again :) It seems we have a release each day claiming that. What's weird is that even deepseek doesn't claim it's better than opus w/ thinking. No idea why you'd say that but anyway.

Dsv3 was a good model. Not benchmaxxed at all, it was pretty stable where it was. Did well on tasks that were ood for benchmarks, even if it was behind SotA.

This seems to be similar. Behind SotA, but not by much, and at a much lower price. The big one is being served (by ds themselves now, more providers will come and we'll see the median price) at 1.74$ in / 3.48$ out / 0.14$ cache. Really cheap for what it offers.

The small one is at 0.14$ in / 0.28$ out / 0.028$ cache, which is pretty much "too cheap to matter". This will be what people can run realistically "at home", and should be a contender for things like haiku/gemini-flash, if it can deliver at those levels.

For the curious, I did some napkin math on their posted benchmarks and it racks up 20.1 percentage point difference across the 20 metrics where both were scored, for an average improvement of about 2% (non-pp). I really can't decide if that's mind blowing or boring?

Claude4.6 was almost 10pp better at at answering questions from long contexts ("corpuses" in CorpusQA and "multiround conversations" in MRCR), while DSv4 was a staggering 14pp better at one math challenge (IMOAnswerBench) and 12pp better at basic Q&A (SimpleQA-Verified).

The dragon awakes yet again!

Pop?