DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

Austria's ISTA lab published a non-uniform compressed build of the 763.2B model; the 248.84GB variant averages 93.54 with a claimed 100% recovery, but requires the Strata engine as llama.cpp lacks support.

The author ran seven local AI agent experiments with Qwen3.8-27B and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, from 16GB consumer GPUs to 512GB systems, building interactive worlds explorable in a browser.

The GSQ-RCO GGUF for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 isn't synced to ModelScope yet, so a user downloaded it from three mirrors at once with comparable speed.

The author says Kimi K3.1 Pro may win on raw performance, but factoring in price and speed, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the better pick.

The author argues Opus 5.5, gpt-6.1-sol and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 are so strong on cost and speed that newcomers like Kimi K3.1 struggle to justify switching.

On the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index, GPT-6 Sol scores 69%, Kimi K3.1 Pro 64% and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 57%.

The author got DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running via Project Maya on a DDR4 64GB machine with two V100s and a 48GB RTX 4090, and posted the output.

Compares Kimi K3.1 Pro, Claude/GPT flagships and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: official API ~200 tok/s, 230 in production, 96% cache hit rate, peak pricing around $0.3/$1.2, making it the practical daily pick.

In an Atomic Agent bug-fix test of Kimi K3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is noted completing the same task in 27 seconds for $0.016, versus 69 seconds and $0.37 for Opus 5.5.

The author is running 11 open-weight models, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, on a Mac mini for the same writing task, with the largest model spilling to SSD; results pending.

In the chart Kimi K3.1 Pro hits about 66% at far lower cost than Claude, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has the lowest cost but a lower score, and Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 sit in the high-cost region.

The author ran Qwen3.8-27B and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash across seven local configurations, from a 16GB RTX 5060 Ti to four DGX Sparks with 512GB combined memory, to have agents build interactive browser worlds.