DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

Same prompt and same key requirement in a Blender Chun-Li test; the author says the price gap is huge but Opus 5.5 still comes out on top.

It ranks first among open models on Code Arena WebDev at roughly a tenth of Kimi K3 Max's cost, first on Agent Arena (11th overall), and ties for second on Artificial Analysis at 45.

A developer's model-routing list assigns visual/UI work to Opus 5.5, non-critical tasks to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, data analysis to GPT-6.1 Sol, and API design or migrations to GPT-6 Astra.

An AWERX team member says they quantized the 10/17 DeepSeek V4.1 Flash release to 1.62 bits per weight with a custom method on ELX3, without speed or quality numbers.

The 1-bit quant is 233–250GB versus 508GB at Q8 and matches the full model's top token 85–88% of the time; the 233GB build runs on a 128GB Mac via an unmerged llama.cpp PR with its 111GB n-gram table on SSD.

The open-weight release ties for second on the intelligence index and climbs the coding leaderboard at a low price, though one comparison with GPT-6 Astra finds it strong on demos but weaker on long-horizon complex development.

SGLang's low-latency mode with DSpark runs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 671→928 tok/s on GB300 (1.38x) and 332→516 tok/s on MI355X (1.56x), with the software open.

A user reports running DeepSeek V4.1 Flash locally on four RTX PRO 6000 GPUs at 410 tok/s.

OpenRouter's weekly token ranking through Oct 19 has Chinese models in the top five, with V4.1 Flash first and the 1017 release sixth, read as cheap models taking volume while pricey ones take hard tasks.

A SAGE-EXL3 1.62bpw quant runs on a single DGX Spark via vLLM at 35.5 tok/s decode, 1189 tok/s prefill, 229K context, and 99.61% code answer agreement; weights are released.

A user asked V4.1 Flash 1017 to fix an Omarchy plugin; the model flagged the user's suggested direction as wrong and gave a more thorough fix, which held up in a Dota2 test after updating.

The author ported the MegaKernel implementation, previously shipped by SGLang only for B300, to B200 and published the code on GitHub.