DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

A user says Kimi K3.1 Pro, MiniMax M3.1 Flash, Muse wonder and Gemini 4 Argon all failed a test while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 held up, without giving test details.

A user says Artificial Analysis' updated scoring gives DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 just 32 points and drops Kimi K3.1 by ten, suspecting the new rubric is biased against Chinese models.

On the new AA index Opus 5.5 leads at 58, Kimi K3.1 Pro tops open weights at 46, and GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 both land at 32.

On the same repo and prompt, 6.1 Sol finished in under half the time of DS 1017 with clearly higher intelligence, while DS 1017 even miscopied strings from the prompt.

Artificial Analysis released v5 of its Intelligence Index, noting a widening gap between frontier and local models, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 sitting 26 points behind Opus 5.5.

On the same eval run, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 took 32 minutes and 220K output tokens for $0.29, versus 79 seconds for GPT-6.1 Terra, 16 minutes for Opus 5.5 and 4 minutes at $1.11 for Muse Wonder.

In a model price comparison chart, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is so cheap that it literally breaks the x-axis scale.

On the same CursorBench 4.0 board, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Max burns 537k tokens per task versus Opus 5.5 Max's 218k, with similar step counts (187 vs 185) but $0.98 versus $13.43 in cost.

Ethan Mollick comments on Artificial Analysis's v5 leaderboard: with private tests added, open-weight models trail further, with released-weight DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 both at 32 versus a top score of 58.

The author reads Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index v5, where private data carries 60% weight: Kimi K3.1 Pro leads open weights at 46 but is unreleased, while released DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 both score 32.

A user reports that running DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 locally on four Sparks delivers both speed and intelligence; Opus 5.5 is still better, but fully local work is now viable, though it saves neither money nor time.

After Cursor shipped its Agent SDK, the author compares coding agent results: Opus 5.5 leads at 61.7 but costs $11.42 per task, while a DeepSeek V4.1 Flash setup costs just $0.39.