DeepSeek V4.1 Flash often matches frontier models at 13–20x lower cost, after 100+ hours of eval review
After 100+ hours digging through eval tasks and running closed-source tasks across frontier models, the author finds V4.1 Flash often on par with frontier models and 13–20x cheaper even when 5–8% behind; on Cursor bench it is 13x cheaper with fully open weights down to the inference stack.
People think that Ahmad is glazing Deepseek V4.1 flash as he is "that opensource guy" but after spending 100+ hours digging through eval tasks and running closed source tasks through many frontier models I am starting to believe him. I am confident that Deepseek V4.1 flash is often really on par with frontier models and even when its low by 5-8% it still cheaper by 13-20 times compared to frontier closed models. Don't take my word for it, even on cursor bench deepseek V4.1 flash is 13 times cheaper than frontier but the only difference is that its fully open weights all the way to the inference stack. The future of humanity is looking bright to me.
This post quotes another post: “Ahmad Osman says DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the closest open model to the frontier”