DeepSeek report admits V4.1 Flash still trails Fable-5 and Astra on hard tasks
The author quotes DeepSeek's technical report saying V4.1 Flash comes close to Fable-5 and GPT-6 Astra in benchmarks but still lags on complex reasoning and edge cases.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is def not on the level of Fable or Astra. Yet, so many people will come saying v4.1 Flash is at the same level after some casual tests or after looking at the benchmarks. That said, the performance, speed and price of DS v4.1 Flash is impressive, that's the point. I also love that the DeepSeek team is brutally honest about this. From the official DeepSeek Technical report: “While DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash demonstrates performance that closely approaches top-tier models like Fable-5 and GPT-6 Astra—offering a highly comparable user experience in daily applications—*a performance gap remains on the most challenging tasks. Although benchmark scores show a narrow margin, this parity does not imply that the model matches the frontier capabilities of leading closed-source systems on complex, high-difficulty reasoning and edge cases”