alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek V4–almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price
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Has anybody used V4 hard, for the most challenging tasks (agentically, locally)? It's so hard to compare without putting serious time in it. Like spending a year daily with the model.
I'm not sure I'd call it "almost on the frontier," but I do think that v4 Pro is the most usable coding model I've seen out of China. I've used it via Ollama Cloud (coding) and OpenRouter (data processing). Feels Sonnet-level to me -- solid at implementation when given a specification, but falls a good bit short of Opus 4.7 max thinking when planning out larger changes or when given open-ended prompts.
I'm surprised that people here don't care at all about these models openly training on your data, especially if you use them straight from the model developer. Whereas things like "GitHub now automatically opts everyone into using their code for model training" get hundreds of justifiably angry comments, I never see this brought up anymore on posts like these talking about using Chinese models through OpenRouter. This might be explained by "well they're different people", but the difference is very stark for that to be the whole explanation.
From the pricing page of deepseek:
(3) The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.
Was this taken into account when reviewing the model?
I'm currently paying for Anthropic's Max subscription (the 100 USD one) and I quite often hit or approach the 5 hour limits, but usually get to around 60-80% of the weekly limits before they reset (Opus 4.7 with high thinking for everything, unless CC decides to spawn sub-agents with Haiku or something).
Those tokens are heavily subsidized, but DeepSeek's API pricing is looking really good. For example, with an agentic coding setup (roughly 85% input, 15% output and around 90% cache reads) I'd get around 150M tokens per month for the same 100 USD. Even at more output tokens and worse cache performance, it'd still most likely be upwards of 100M.
The V3/R1 time and now are in such contrast. V3/R1 were hyped hard and barely usable for coding. V4 is much less hyped but (anecdotally) it has completely demolished all the Flash/Lite/Spark models.
I recently switched from Claude to Opencode Go + pi.dev. It has Deepseek v4 pro along with Kimi K2.6, and it's performing quite well for basic coding, without hitting any limits.
I've been using v4 pro for the past few days and honestly in terms of quality it seems more or less on par with open AIs 5.4 or opus 4.6 (i havent tried 4.7)
To be clear, i'm not doing state of the art stuff. I mostly used it for frontend development since i'm not great at that and just need a decent looking prototype.
But for my purposes it's a perfectly good model, and the price is decent.
I can't wait for open model small enough for me to run locally come out though. I hate having to rely on someone elses machines (and getting all my data exfiltrated that way)
I tried deepseek v4 through open code at the weekend. I'm a daily Claude/Claude code user.
I tried to build something simple and while it got the job done the thinking displayed did not fill me with confidence. It was pages and pages of "actually no", "hang on", "wait that makes no sense". It was like the model was having a breakdown.
Bear in mind open code was also new to me so I could be just seeing thinking where I usually don't
The pelican is really getting old as an a standalone evaluation metric. By now they are certainly going to be in training set if not explicitly tuned to produce it for the press on HN alone.
Keep the pelican but isn’t it time to add something else more novel that all current and past models struggle with?
I doubt if those models already knew this pelican test...
I tweeted about some implementation and review runs that used V4 Pro.
Even without the currently discounted pricing, the value is incredible.
It takes about twice as long to finish code reviews given an identical context compared to opus 4.7/gpt 5.5 but at 1/10 the cost of less, there's just no comparison.
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Deepseek v4 Pro feels like Claude Opus 4.6 in it's personality but here's what I did find out about costs:
I did cut loose Deepseek v4 on a decent sized Typescript codebase and asked it to only focus on a single endpoint and go in depth on it layer by layer (API, DTOs, service, database models) and form a complete picture of types involved and introduced and ensure no adhoc types are being introduced.
It developed a very brief but very to the point summary of types being introduced and which of them were refunded etc.
Then I asked it to simplify it all.
It obviously went through lots of files in both prompts but total cost? Just $0.09 for the Pro version.
On Claude Opus I think (from past experience before price hikes) these two prompts alone would have burned somewhere between $9 to $13 easily with not much benefit.
Note - I didn't use Open router rather used the Deepseek API directly because Open router itself was being rate limited by Deep seek.