DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

It ranked 7th of 9 at 51.7% for just $0.94 total, best 3D room designer at 8.8/10, Pokémon 8.2, but weak on QMK and Docker at 3.0, about 10x cheaper than Opus.

Recaps the official launch points: stronger benchmarks, faster task completion, shorter outputs, live on web, app and API, described by DeepSeek as a better-and-cheaper Pareto upgrade.

DeepSeek's own table shows V4.1 Flash ahead on DeepSWE 77.0 vs 74.0 and Automation-Bench 60.5 vs 50.3, behind on Terminal-Bench 42.3 vs 51.8 and NL2Repo 68.2 vs 75.3, at ~$0.19 vs ~$12 per task.

Open weights are downloadable from Hugging Face and ModelScope without approval, though parameter count, VRAM needs and speed are not stated and must be checked in the config files.

Experiential Labs advertises free access to V4.1 Flash 1017 with a 1.05M context window and up to 393K output tokens.

A user claims DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 matches Opus 5.5 and rivals Gemini 4 Argon on 3D and multimodal work, slower but far cheaper with 99% cache hit rate, backed by a recreated 3D lawnmower video.

DeepSeek's 1017 update claims higher scores, faster task completion and shorter outputs; CLI task score rose from 31.2 to 42.3 and some automation tests beat Opus 5; Search/Fetch API costs ¥5 per 1,000 calls from Nov 1; MIT-licensed 763B-parameter weights are open.

The commenter argues Gemini 4 Argon's current availability is so poor that, next to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, it might as well be unreleased.

A user reports that after burning through Codex and Claude Code credits, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 with dsh felt almost as good and cheap enough to seem unlimited.

Reports V4.1 Flash 1017 generating 244 tokens per second, beating the $500/month GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast mode, plus Search & Fetch API free in Harness until Oct 31 then $0.75 per 1,000 calls.

At equal input and output token counts, DeepSeek's official API costs roughly 1/13–1/17 of Sonnet 5.5 and 1/27–1/33 of Opus 5.5, with a Hugging Face weights link.

A side-by-side same-prompt generation comparison between DeepSeek V4.1-1017 and Gemini 4 Argon, with the poster calling DeepSeek the clear winner.