DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

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.

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 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.

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.

A Claude Code workflow uses Opus 5.5 as orchestrator and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash sub-agents running 24 in parallel on Vercel Sandbox, with the author claiming ~99% of work done by DeepSeek for about $9 (unverified).

On the new Artificial Analysis index, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 Max score 32, a full 26 points behind Claude Opus 5.5, while Kimi K3.1 Pro leads Chinese models at 46.

Artificial Analysis' new Intelligence Index v5, with more private test items, puts DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 at 32 points, 26 behind leader Claude Opus 5.5.

The ranking post puts Opus 5.5 at 58, GPT-6 Astra at 57 and GPT-6.1 Sol at 55, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3 tied at 32, and adds a coding test judged by real repo maintainers.

With one bug planted in each of 60 real open-source diffs, Opus 5.5 and Gemini 4 Argon scored 54, GPT-6.1 Sol 49, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 48 and Sonnet 5.5 42.

The author is cancelling GPT Pro over OpenAI halving limits on October 30, moving to Claude Max with Opus 5.5 as orchestrator and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 via Baseten at ~599 TPS for subagent work.

A short usage note says pairing Opus 5.5 as planner/orchestrator with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash as the executor is the author's current go-to setup.

On CursorBench 4.0, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 44.9% at $0.60 per task on Low up to 47.7% at $0.98 on Max, while Opus 5.5 Low gets 43.7% at $1.17.