alt Hacker NewsIf you use it day-to-day you can definitely feel that K3 (and K3.1) are much stronger than DS4.1-Flash-1017. There's something the benchmarks don't capture. DS4.1-Flash-1017 is an amazing model for the price, but it's not a very large model in comparison.
I wouldn't over-weight internal benchmarks from a competitor that claim benchmaxxing TBH. Kimi K3 has been at the top of Design Arena for open-weight models for a long long time, and I suspect K3.1 will be there for a long time too. It's pretty hard to fake that one since it's actual human preferences for the artifacts produced.
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every time i accidentally use flash versions of deep seek i get really frustrated with the model till i realize that it was the wrong model. im also a little confused because it seems like at least comparisons make it sound like ds is no longer focusing on their high reasoning model family …
And how do you reckon GLM and Qwen stack up?
How do you use them day-to-day? The subscription lasts for minutes of usage at at time, and API costs are crazy high. There is zero reason to use it over an Anthropic subscription, it is not faster or cheaper - unlike DeepSeek 4.1, MiMo 2.6 or other flash models.
Speaking of arena comparisons of K3.1 and DS4.1-Flash, we're spinning one up that's more relevant than design, I think: https://agentduel.com/leaderboard
Here, DS4.1-Flash and K3.1 are basically tied, with K3.1 being slower and more expensive. Big error bars, though.
Even with error bars, DS4.1-flash is clearly an impressive model.