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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731

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  • New DeepSeek release: 304B parameters (167GB on Hugging Face), pitched by Willison as possibly “the best value-per-intelligence model out there” at $0.14/M input and $0.27/M output tokens.
  • Artificial Analysis ranks it ahead of MiniMax M3 (428B) despite being smaller; Willison calculates roughly $0.028 per task at a 50 intelligence score, undercutting models that cost 10x more for similar capability.
  • Needs “substantially enhanced agentic capabilities” and performs best with reasoning effort set to “high” — demonstrated via image-generation examples.
  • Takeaway: another entry in the ongoing pattern of open-weight Chinese labs undercutting frontier-lab pricing while staying competitive on quality.