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AI · Tuesday, September 15, 2026 · 4 sources

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash offers European firms cheap open-source AI for agent tasks

Chinese lab DeepSeek has released V4.1 Flash, a 552B-parameter open-source model that activates only 8B parameters during long-context prefill. Priced at roughly €0.14 per million input tokens off-peak, it matches GPT-5.6 and Claude Opus 5 on several agent benchmarks, per DeepSeek's report. For European startups and enterprises, it provides a viable, cost-effective alternative to US big tech AI models.

Bottom line — DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 74.2 on DeepSWE at a fraction of GPT-5.6's price, per the company.

Go deeper (7)

  • The model uses a Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture with 552B total parameters but only 8B active during prefill and 16B during decode, per DeepSeek's technical report.
  • Its global KV cache is compressed to 890 bytes per token, about one-quarter of V4 Flash's demand, according to DeepSeek's paper.
  • In DeepSeek's benchmarks, V4.1 Flash achieves 74.2 on DeepSWE v1.1, 90.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, and 54.8 on AutomationBench, per the same report.
  • The official API costs $0.15 (€0.14) per million input tokens off-peak and $0.60 (€0.54) per million output tokens, compared to $2 and $10 for Claude Sonnet 5, as compiled by the DEV Community analysis.
  • However, independent testing suggests models like GLM-5.3 Flash offer stronger intelligence per dollar, according to AI Mastery's cross-referenced analysis.
  • DeepSeek also provides a migration path: legacy model IDs deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro now route to V4.1 Flash at the new pricing until V4.1 Pro launches, per the company.
  • The MIT-licensed checkpoint and reference inference code allow European teams to self-host and inspect the model, per KDnuggets.

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Last generated: Sep 15, 11:30 AM UTC by wreetco wreetco

dstld. Your daily news summary designed to surface the news that matters from a European perspective. Curated by humans, summarized by AI - always with links back to the original reporting.

Links · Contact
Popular topics · WorldEuropeGamesAI
Last generated: Sep 15, 11:30 AM UTC by wreetco wreetco