DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 cost: ~20 cents per coding task, output at $0.60 vs Opus 5's $25 per 1M

weft · China AI Signal @sybx11Originally posted 2026.10.18

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"Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs." DeepSeek dropped V4.1-Flash-1017 yesterday — and its own charts show it beating Claude Opus 5 on DeepSWE (77 vs 74). A coding task runs about 20 cents. Off-peak API output: $0.60/1M tokens vs Opus 5's $25. The benchmark isn't the story. China keeps collapsing the price floor while the West raises the compute ceiling. What happens to the agent economy when frontier coding costs pocket change? Follow for daily China AI signals. #AI #DeepSeek