DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

The same prompt asks DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Claude Opus 5.5 to build an AK-47, with a cost comparison of $0.30 vs $5.29 and viewers left to judge the better result.

On the same task DeepSeek cost $0.40 and took 2h07m, while GPT-6 Astra cost $14.37 and finished in 40m18s; the author asks whether Astra is worth 36x the price.

Release highlights: open weights free to download, self-reinforcement RL for building games and 3D from prompts, and a Search API at about ¥5 per 1K calls.

The poster notes V4.1 Flash 1017 ships MIT weights despite being called a minor update; in one test Opus 5.5 won at 20 minutes and $6 versus DeepSeek's 1 hour and $0.23, about 26x cheaper.

Third-party platform DimAgent says all its public beta plans now run DeepSeek V4.1 Flash version 1017, with pricing and discounts unchanged.

A chart shared on r/LocalLLaMA combines 12 benchmarks into an Agentic Coding Index, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (1017) and other open-weight models ranking high, sparking comparisons with closed models.

The post says V4.1-Flash-1017 scores 77 on DeepSWE at roughly $0.20 per task (about $0.10 in low settings), weights are on Hugging Face, and DeepSeek claims it beats Opus 5 and GPT 5.6-Sol pending independent tests.

One-shot same prompt: Opus 5.5 Max took 2h09m and cost $55.59, while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Max took 1h21m and cost $0.46 — faster and roughly 120x cheaper.

Hugging Face now hosts the DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 snapshot, which the post says brings latency optimizations to cut token processing costs on complex tasks.

OpenGateway offers a 90% off-peak and weekend discount on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (1017) and GLM-5.3 Flash, claiming 848 TPS, auto-applied through October 31.

DeepSeek says the new version scores higher, finishes tasks faster and answers more briefly than the last one, calling it a Pareto improvement in performance and cost; the poster notes output length drives agent-run spend.

Reacting to the V4.1-Flash-1017 launch, the post cites a report showing 97.3% cache hit rate and cached input at 4.6% of list price, far below Qwen, Kimi and GLM.