alt Hacker NewsDS isn't better than Sol and Gemini in the benchmarks, but after working with them all for a while now I'm beginning to understand why people find DS _feels_ so much better.
First, it's the tok/s and TTFT from providers. Deepseek blazes through work - at quite good quality - and you don't find yourself waiting for your agents to finish.
Second is the openness. Being able to see the CoT and not being randomly blocked for cyber review. You're never wondering if it's stuck or if it will randomly fail. Combined with the great cost value.. My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
Replies
> My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
Wait... you just spent 3 paragraphs singing the praises of DS... and then you say you're going to subscribe to the one that makes GLM. ?
(I do tend to agree with you, though I tend to favor GLM-5.3-flash over DS 4.1 flash.)
Agreed.
It doesn’t have to be better, it just had to be nearly equivalent. I’ve been doing a lot of vulnerability work lately (trying to get ahead of the bots finding exploits in our code) and the frontier models feel like a chaperone at a church dance: get too close and they show up with the ruler and enforce the safety margin. Using deepseek and glm and qwen, I’ve gotten nearly equivalent results without the constraints. I still use frontier models for things but outside of a company environment, I’m happy to spend 1/10 the money, get the same results, and not have try and trick the AI into working.
No need to use a chinese provider, in case that's an issue for you. https://fireworks.ai provides this model for an ok price.
>> Being able to see the CoT
Dont assume that is how your model decides...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388
Deepseek is not from Z.ai, that's GLM.
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash hallucinates like crazy.[1]
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017 any better?
Absolutely!
DeepSeek feels like an excellent sparring partner. The others feel like mind readers.
I don't have to worry about any complex context engineering / multi agent stuff if I am using DeepSeek because the sequential stuff is fast enough. I don't have to bother about touching a million context length because its cheap enough.
Where it seems to lag behind is 3d, computer use, motion graphics, design but the initial demos seem like the vision model has improved substantially.
>My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
please don't subject yourself to this. z.ai subscriptions are not a good value. just pay API rates, or use a subscription like opencode go.
Is that a dig on DeepSeek not offering subscription plans?
If so OpenCode Go looks good and includes DeepSeek models (yet to try myself).
I second this, I love DS and am not looking back. For Elixir, not a lot of models are good, but DS just blazes through it.
Google's Argon model via antigravity is unusable, for a small code review I asked, already spent like 10% of the weekly usage, in less than 10 mins. Very useless imho.
I always find DS or Qwen to be very spot on on audit changes or plans for just a few cents.
I'm enjoying Alibaba's Token Plan. They don't have any hourly/daily cutoffs. You get your allotment for the month and use it when you want.
If I were part of a cabal that is interested in preserving control and trying to secure trillions of dollars, it would be a minor effort to nudge and bend the curve against competitors like the Asian AI complex.
I do not use DS for coding, but for various natural language processing tasks (even translation) in large volume, and it works wonder.
It is very capable for a lot of tasks, not only coding like the other open models.
> not being randomly blocked for cyber review
Just to test, will GLM – hosted by an infra provider other than Z.AI – also stop answering if I asked controversial questions from the pov of its country of origin? Or third party infra providers can perform some unhinging on the model before hosting? Or actually the blocking happens even before the question reaches the LLMs in that country?
(Note: my paid LLM access at this point are only via DS and GLM subs - 90-95% usage; and a free Gemini Pro access. I hope that adds some cred that I am not trying to take potshots at the their country of origin).
Deepseek and Muse are my go to for cheap. both work perfect for basic and mid tier tasks
I like it because it does the thing I want it to do rather than moralizing.
No, I don't care about license provenance for all the components of a 30 line script that i'm using in my house, for myself to sync up some folders. No, i'm not going to find and archive the licenses for all the previous projects leading to this for future legal disclosure.
Yes, I own the DVD for the movie i'm transcoding. No I don't want to talk about the legality of rebroadcast.
Deepseek (and most chinese models as a whole) don't care . oAI and Anthropic models want to make it point #1.
... which is extra hilarious knowing the laws broken to create the damn models in the first place.
there's a literal meme about this floating around the harness/AI chats for the past few months[0]
[0]: https://i.ibb.co/SwH4Sgwq/796779070-28483090404651613-920066...
I think opencode go is the better value to get access to DeepSeek.
> Deepseek... My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
Wait wut? You do realize that they are two different companies, right?
and really , for 90% of standard agentic work, deepseek flash is more than good enough. its the main driver for our Personal Assistant offering and users love it.
For us neophytes, what does this mean: “randomly blocked for cyber review”?
Agreed, but don’t subscribe to z.ai; their inference is terrible. Stick with openrouter
> Being able to see the CoT and not being randomly blocked for cyber review.
I had a bad experience with MiMo from Xiaomi. I had it trigger unsafe content blocks while fixing visual bugs in a completely vanilla space game it just wrote from scratch in the same session. It also got triggered for changes in some other benign greenfield app.
Huh, doesn't DeepSeek take the longest because it overthinks way too much? Haven't tested this release yet but was very disappointed with past ones because it takes an eternity to do anything because it constantly overthinks and questions itself way too much instead of just starting.
Isnt Z.ai for GLM? Does Z.ai provide Deepseek?
I love using glm 5.3 more than deepseek because of performance
For 99% of the tasks any model really would do, even GPT 5.4 from an year ago.
It's only for long running/very difficult cases that the differences are here, and they are small.
still a myracle to me what people achieve with it? I tried so many things with it, everything is broken it produces
Feels better to me in the sense that it doesn't try to be too clever. When I ask it to do things it actually generates code that a developer would write. That still lets me build software in layers like I do mentally. And it keeps you in control of where abstractions are.
Some people would say that you don't need this at all with the frontier llms. But when extending existing software or writing software that fits into an existing ecosystem, I find I still need to offer a lot of guidance. And it's better that the context window isn't flooded with code that was reverted after I looked at it.