DeepSeek Releases Open-Source V4.1 Flash, Matching Flagship Coding Performance at Fractional CostHacker News AIT2Models

Hacker News AI · 10/19/2026, 12:41:46

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Released with Intelligence Index of 45

68AI Score

Executive Summary

DeepSeek released the open-weights model V4.1 Flash (Max) in October 2026, scoring 45 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The model emphasizes cost-efficiency and speed, delivering 230.4 output tokens per second at a cost of $0.26 per intelligence task.

SOURCE COVERAGEFull Original Report

Contents43 sections

Artificial Analysis DeepSeek•

Open weights model

•

Released October 2026

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis

Try it out API Provider Benchmarks

Model summary

Intelligence

45Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index4 out of 4 units for Intelligence.

Speed

230.4Output tokens per second4 out of 4 units for Speed.

Cost

In $0.30Out$ 1.20Cache Discount 98%$0.26Cost per Intelligence Index task2 out of 4 units for Cost.

Verbosity

210MOutput tokens from Intelligence Index4 out of 4 units for Verbosity.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is amongst the leading models in intelligence and reasonably priced when comparing to other open weight models of similar size. It's also notably fast, however very verbose. The model supports text and image input, outputs text, and has a 1M tokens context window.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) scores 45 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, placing it well above average among comparable models (median: 19). When evaluating the Intelligence Index, it generated 210M tokens, which is very verbose in comparison to the median of 140M.

Pricing for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is $0.30 per 1M input tokens (moderately priced, median:$ 0.43) and $1.20 per 1M output tokens (moderately priced, median:$ 1.68). On average, it costs $0.26 per task to evaluate DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) on the Intelligence Index.

At 230 tokens per second, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is notably fast (78).

Reasoning	Yes This page shows the reasoning version of this model. A non-reasoning variant may also exist.
Input modality	Supports: text and image
Output modality	Supports: text
Context window	1M~1500 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font
Total parameters	552B
Active parameters	16BNumber of parameters active per token during inference
License	MIT
Model weights	Hugging Face

Metrics are compared against models of the same class:

Non-reasoning models → compared only with other non-reasoning models
Reasoning models → compared across both reasoning and non-reasoning
Open weights models → compared only with other open weights models of the same size class:
Proprietary models → compared across proprietary and open weights models of the same price range, using a blended 3 input/output price ratio:

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better

Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

Cost per Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Lower is better

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 incorporates 10 evaluations: AA-Briefcase v1.1, GDPval-AA v2.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, SciCode, Humanity's Last Exam, GDP.pdf, CritPt, AA-Omniscience, AA-LCR v1.1No publicly available API

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 includes: AA-Briefcase v1.1, GDPval-AA v2.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, SciCode, Humanity's Last Exam, GDP.pdf, CritPt, AA-Omniscience, AA-LCR v1.1. See Intelligence Index methodology for further details, including a breakdown of each evaluation and how we run them.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

Indicates whether the model weights are available. Models are labelled as 'Commercial Use Restricted' if commercial use is limited by conditions, and as 'Non-commercial' if the license prohibits commercial use.

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index taskMost attractive quadrantPareto line

Weighted average cost per Intelligence Index task. Each evaluation’s cost is calculated from input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices, divided by task count, and weighted by its Intelligence Index weight.

Capability Indexes

Measures the performance of models on specific capabilities and industries

Artificial Analysis Finance & Accounting Index

Incorporates 7 evaluations: AA-Omniscience, GDPval-AA v2.1, AA-Briefcase v1.1, Humanity's Last Exam, AutomationBench-AA, AA-LCR v1.1, GDP.pdf · Higher is betterNo publicly available API

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Intelligence evaluations measured independently by Artificial Analysis · Higher is betterSee moreNo publicly available APIAA-Briefcase v1.1Updated

Agentic knowledge work, (Elo-500)/2000

AA-Omniscience Accuracy

Knowledge

AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate

1 - hallucination rate

AutomationBench-AA

Agentic SaaS workflows

GDPval-AA v2.1Updated

Agentic real-world work tasks, (Elo-500)/2000

Humanity's Last Exam

Reasoning & knowledge

GDP.pdf

Professional document reasoning, All-pass

Terminal-Bench 4.0

Agentic coding & terminal use

AA-LCR v1.1

Long context reasoning

SciCodeUnder review

Coding

CritPtUnder review

Physics reasoning

Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1New

Agentic scientific research workflows in a terminal

FrontierCode 1.1New

Agentic software engineering in open-source repositories

AA-AnalystAgent

Quantitative analysis on spreadsheets & documents

Harvey LAB-AA v1.1Updated

Legal agentic work, Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate

EnterpriseOps-Gym-AA

Agentic business operations

ITBench-AA

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

MLCR-AA

Medical long context reasoning

MMMU-Pro

Visual reasoning

While model intelligence generally translates across use cases, specific evaluations may be more relevant for certain use cases.

AA-Briefcase v1.1Updated

AA-Briefcase Elo

AA-Briefcase v1.1 is an agentic knowledge work benchmark developed by Artificial Analysis. AA-Briefcase Elo is a combined metric that aggregates rubric pass rate, analytical quality Elo and presentation Elo · Higher is betterNo publicly available API

AA-Briefcase Elo is a combined metric that aggregates analytical quality Elo, presentation Elo, and rubric pass rate, with rubric performance converted into Elo via synthetic head-to-head matches. Elo and 95% confidence interval bounds are clamped at 0.

AA-Omniscience

AA-Omniscience Index

AA-Omniscience Index (higher is better) measures knowledge reliability and hallucination. It rewards correct answers, penalizes hallucinations, and has no penalty for refusing to answer. Scores range from -100 to 100, where 0 means as many correct as incorrect answers, and negative scores mean more incorrect than correct.No publicly available API

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Openness Index assesses model openness on a 0 to 100 normalized scale (higher is more open)

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index taskMost attractive quadrantPareto line

Token Use

Output Tokens per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average number of output tokens used to run one task in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence IndexNo publicly available API

The number of tokens required per Intelligence Index task. This is calculated by multiplying the output tokens per eval by the relative weights of each benchmark in the Intelligence Index, then dividing by task count (excluding repeats).

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Segmented by token type · Lower is better

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost (USD) to run all evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

The cost to run the evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, calculated using the model's input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices and the number of tokens used across evaluations (excluding repeats).

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Price (USD per M Tokens)

Price per token for cached prompts (previously processed), typically offering a significant discount compared to regular input price, represented as USD per million tokens. The values shown here are the cache hit price; cache write and cache storage are billed separately and vary by provider — see "Cache pricing by provider" for detail.

Context Window

Context window: tokens limit · Higher is betterNo publicly available API

Larger context windows are relevant to RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) LLM workflows which typically involve reasoning and information retrieval of large amounts of data.

Maximum number of combined input & output tokens. Output tokens commonly have a significantly lower limit (varied by model).

Speed

Measured by Output Speed (tokens per second)

Output Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

Tokens per second received while the model is generating tokens (ie. after first chunk has been received from the API for models which support streaming).

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average decode time (minutes) per Intelligence Index task · Excludes TTFT and overhead time · Lower is better

The weighted average time (seconds) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task. This is calculated by dividing output tokens per task by output speed, weighted by the relative weights of each benchmark in the Intelligence Index.

Latency

Measured by Time (seconds) to First Token

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Seconds to first answer token received · Accounts for reasoning model 'thinking' time

Time to first answer token received, in seconds, after API request sent. For reasoning models, this includes the 'thinking' time of the model before providing an answer. For models which do not support streaming, this represents time to receive the completion.

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, calculated based on time to first token, 'thinking' time for reasoning models, and output speed

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, including reasoning model 'thinking' time · Lower is better

Seconds to receive a 500 token response. Key components:

Input time: Time to receive the first response token
Thinking time (only for reasoning models): Time reasoning models spend outputting tokens to reason prior to providing an answer. Amount of tokens based on the average reasoning tokens across a diverse set of 60 prompts (methodology details).
Answer time: Time to generate 500 output tokens, based on output speed

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Comparison between total model parameters and parameters active during inference (billions)

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

The number of parameters actually executed during each inference forward pass, expressed in billions. For Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, a routing mechanism selects a subset of experts per token, resulting in fewer active than total parameters. Dense models use all parameters, so active equals total.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) was released on October 17, 2026.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) was created by DeepSeek.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) scores 45 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, placing it well above average among other open weight models of similar size (median: 19).

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) generates output at 230.4 tokens per second (based on DeepSeek's API), which is well above average compared to other open weight models of similar size (median: 77.9 t/s).

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) has a time to first token (TTFT) of 1.08s (based on DeepSeek's API), which is very competitive compared to other open weight models of similar size (median: 1.69s).

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) costs $0.30 per 1M input tokens (better than average, median:$ 0.43) and $1.20 per 1M output tokens (better than average, median:$ 1.68), based on DeepSeek's API.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) costs $0.30 per 1M input tokens and$ 1.20 per 1M output tokens (based on DeepSeek's API). For a blended rate (7:2 cache hit/input/output ratio), this is $0.18 per 1M tokens. Pricing may vary by provider. Compare provider pricing

When evaluated on the Intelligence Index, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) generated 210M output tokens, which is at the higher end compared to other open weight models of similar size (median: 140M).

Yes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is a reasoning model. It uses extended thinking or chain-of-thought reasoning to work through complex problems before providing an answer.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) supports text and image input.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) supports text output.

Yes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) supports image input and can analyze, describe, and answer questions about images.

Yes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is multimodal. It can process text and image input and generate text output.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) has a context window of 1.0M tokens. This determines how much text and conversation history the model can process in a single request.

Yes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is open weights. The model weights are publicly available and can be downloaded for self-hosting.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) has 552 billion parameters (16 billion active).

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with 552 billion total parameters, but only 16 billion active parameters are used during inference.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is released under the MIT license. This license allows commercial use. View license

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) achieves a score of 45 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This composite benchmark evaluates models across reasoning, knowledge, mathematics, and coding.

Yes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is available via API through 5 providers. Compare API providers

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) is available through 5 API providers. Compare providers