10 ms·

Since a few months, I almost exclusively use the Chinese "flash" models for my needs. They are a joy and they cost pennies per answer. Great job.

by EbNar 9d ago

hgoel 9d ago
Yeah, the latest batch of <256GB Chinese models are really nice. They're far less cryptic than Claude, and competent enough to feel almost near Opus. I canceled all my subscriptions and switched to running the Chinese models locally (not as a cost saving measure).
iamjs 9d ago
Do you use them for coding with your harness or do you use them in production? I found the latency distribution on OpenRouter to be unusable for DeepSeek v4 Flash.
ActionHank 9d ago
I am legitimately more excited for this release than any frontier models at this point. I don't need a model that can invent new mathematics. I need something that is fast, cheap, and consistent. Give me that and I can build and scale.
- Oras 9d ago
  LLMs are not consistent
  - ActionHank 9d ago
    True, make them cheap and fast enough and you can scope and stack agents sufficiently that the error rate tends close enough to zero to be meaningfully useful.
XzAeRosho 9d ago
Same for me. DeepSeek models are incredibly good at implementation and light planning. I still default to Opus models for feature planning, but for most simple features the Pro models suffice. Incredible good value and product they have built.
darkoob12 9d ago
My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese models. This way we help them develop and improve models some day we can run them locally.
- kzrdude 9d ago
  The Chinese labs have released interesting papers to accompany their releases too, especially DeepSeek and Kimi. This improves their standing among a few of us, who really like to see and read the papers with details about what they have changed and how their models work.
  - kzrdude 9d ago
    And just a day later we have the tech report available for V4.1: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/main/DeepSeek_V41_Tech_Report.pdf https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/...
- efficax 9d ago
  the US is also a surveillance state except about 80% of the surveillance is private companies (that are closely tied to the state)
- ricardobeat 9d ago
  These models are open-weights. Anyone can host them, you don’t have to use chinese servers even though most of them offer zero data-retention policies.
  - m00dy 9d ago
    >>zero data-retention policies Yeah, that’s basically an industry-wide scam.
pimeys 9d ago
Yes. I'm working in the agent industry and my god are we excited on new versions of Chinese flash models. The direct competition is Gemini Flash, and these models are much better on agentic tasks with fraction of the task price compared to Gemini. Things like oh here's a set of simple instructions for you to follow, call these tools, return this report. 20-30% of the price per task. And especially Deepseek Flash produces better quality than Gemini does. Where Gemini still wins is non-text input what Deepseek cannot do, yet, and Deepseek Flash has this thing of cheaper models where a failing tool call can derail your agent to a retry loop if you're not careful on instructions in the error message. If they fix and make the tool calls to work better in non-optimal situations, it's much easier to switch from Gemini without a few weeks of evals and bugfixing.
- urieiejr 9d ago
  [dead]
  - pimeys 9d ago
    Well, it's much more than that. In general everybody's building agents now. You see these things that can help you to do things like adding things like OCR an appointment from a picture of a hand-written paper and add it to your calendar, search things from the internet, find that email with a PDF and add it to your local paperless instance. Building an agent like this by yourself is really easy. Now, we have Gemini's subscription, OpenAI's ChatGPT subscription and all those, 20 bucks a month right? What if you can spend that 20 bucks in tokens to do your own. And you pay 15 bucks _a year_ in tokens to run that? And you own the data, you own your code and integrations. It's really easy to do, and these flash models are _more than enough_ for simple agentic tasks.
- bitexploder 9d ago
  Which versions of flash and at what thinking levels? Which chinese flash models and at what thinking levels? What tasks? What completion rates? How was quality evaluated?
  - 9d ago
serf 9d ago
I recently had to config my harness to watch for cybersecurity flags from astra and funnel requests to flash when they occur because Astra gets queezy when you talk to it about UDP packets in games. Works fantastic. Glad there is a more 'uncensored' thing to fall back to when the frontier folk are too sensitive.
- nicce 9d ago
  The only positive side is that it is harder for students to feed university exercises to the agent in cybersecurity and expect it to make them all.

Since a few months, I almost exclusively use the Chinese "flash" models for my needs. They are a joy and they cost pennies per answer. Great job.

by EbNar 9d ago

Since a few months, I almost exclusively use the Chinese "flash" models for my needs. They are a joy and they cost pennies per answer. Great job.

hgoel 9d ago

Yeah, the latest batch of <256GB Chinese models are really nice. They're far less cryptic than Claude, and competent enough to feel almost near Opus. I canceled all my subscriptions and switched to running the Chinese models locally (not as a cost saving measure).

iamjs 9d ago

Do you use them for coding with your harness or do you use them in production? I found the latency distribution on OpenRouter to be unusable for DeepSeek v4 Flash.

ActionHank 9d ago

I am legitimately more excited for this release than any frontier models at this point. I don't need a model that can invent new mathematics. I need something that is fast, cheap, and consistent. Give me that and I can build and scale.

Oras 9d ago
LLMs are not consistent
- ActionHank 9d ago
  True, make them cheap and fast enough and you can scope and stack agents sufficiently that the error rate tends close enough to zero to be meaningfully useful.

XzAeRosho 9d ago

Same for me. DeepSeek models are incredibly good at implementation and light planning. I still default to Opus models for feature planning, but for most simple features the Pro models suffice. Incredible good value and product they have built.

darkoob12 9d ago

My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese models. This way we help them develop and improve models some day we can run them locally.

kzrdude 9d ago
The Chinese labs have released interesting papers to accompany their releases too, especially DeepSeek and Kimi. This improves their standing among a few of us, who really like to see and read the papers with details about what they have changed and how their models work.
- kzrdude 9d ago
  And just a day later we have the tech report available for V4.1: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/main/DeepSeek_V41_Tech_Report.pdf https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/...
efficax 9d ago
the US is also a surveillance state except about 80% of the surveillance is private companies (that are closely tied to the state)
ricardobeat 9d ago
These models are open-weights. Anyone can host them, you don’t have to use chinese servers even though most of them offer zero data-retention policies.
- m00dy 9d ago
  >>zero data-retention policies Yeah, that’s basically an industry-wide scam.

pimeys 9d ago

Yes. I'm working in the agent industry and my god are we excited on new versions of Chinese flash models. The direct competition is Gemini Flash, and these models are much better on agentic tasks with fraction of the task price compared to Gemini. Things like oh here's a set of simple instructions for you to follow, call these tools, return this report. 20-30% of the price per task. And especially Deepseek Flash produces better quality than Gemini does. Where Gemini still wins is non-text input what Deepseek cannot do, yet, and Deepseek Flash has this thing of cheaper models where a failing tool call can derail your agent to a retry loop if you're not careful on instructions in the error message. If they fix and make the tool calls to work better in non-optimal situations, it's much easier to switch from Gemini without a few weeks of evals and bugfixing.

urieiejr 9d ago
[dead]
- pimeys 9d ago
  Well, it's much more than that. In general everybody's building agents now. You see these things that can help you to do things like adding things like OCR an appointment from a picture of a hand-written paper and add it to your calendar, search things from the internet, find that email with a PDF and add it to your local paperless instance. Building an agent like this by yourself is really easy. Now, we have Gemini's subscription, OpenAI's ChatGPT subscription and all those, 20 bucks a month right? What if you can spend that 20 bucks in tokens to do your own. And you pay 15 bucks _a year_ in tokens to run that? And you own the data, you own your code and integrations. It's really easy to do, and these flash models are _more than enough_ for simple agentic tasks.
bitexploder 9d ago
Which versions of flash and at what thinking levels? Which chinese flash models and at what thinking levels? What tasks? What completion rates? How was quality evaluated?
- 9d ago

serf 9d ago

I recently had to config my harness to watch for cybersecurity flags from astra and funnel requests to flash when they occur because Astra gets queezy when you talk to it about UDP packets in games. Works fantastic. Glad there is a more 'uncensored' thing to fall back to when the frontier folk are too sensitive.

nicce 9d ago
The only positive side is that it is harder for students to feed university exercises to the agent in cybersecurity and expect it to make them all.