explainx / blog
DeepSeek V4 preview: V4-Pro & V4-Flash, 1M context, OpenAI & Anthropic APIs, HF weights, thinking modes. Legacy chat & reasoner retire Jul 24, 2026 UTC.
Jun 29, 2026
Two months of V4 was preview — official ships mid-July with peak pricing at 2× off-peak. Baseline unchanged. Teortaxes, timezone math, and the Chinese wording on performance.
Jun 29, 2026
On June 28, 2026, a thread with 200K+ views argued China's AI playbook is simple: ship great models for free, export cheap inference powered by low-cost electricity, and wait for Huawei to close the chip gap. Here's what the skeptics push back on — and what it means if they're wrong.
Jun 29, 2026
China's AI industry has consolidated around ten serious providers plus the Six Tigers startup cohort. This guide maps every major lab — what they ship, who they serve, how they price, and which models developers actually use in production.
Update (July 1, 2026): DeepSeek announced official V4 mid-July 2026 — preview graduates with peak-hour pricing (2× baseline during Beijing 9–12 & 14–18). Off-peak rates unchanged. Peak pricing guide →
DeepSeek published DeepSeek V4 Preview Release on April 24, 2026: open weights, 1M-token default context on official services, and two new API model IDs—deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash. This article is a field note for engineers: what changed, how to migrate, and where to read primary materials—not a substitute for DeepSeek API Docs.
Benchmark and “SOTA” claims below are as stated by DeepSeek in that post; treat them as marketing-facing positioning until you run your own evals on real workloads.
| Topic | Takeaway |
|---|---|
| New models | deepseek-v4-pro (larger, flagship) and deepseek-v4-flash (smaller, economical). |
| Context | 1M tokens is the default across official DeepSeek services per the announcement. |
| API shape | Same base_url; swap model string. OpenAI Chat Completions + Anthropic APIs supported. |
| Modes | Thinking and Non-Thinking—see Thinking Mode. |
| Weights | Hugging Face collection + tech report PDF. |
| Legacy IDs | deepseek-chat / deepseek-reasoner retire after 2026-07-24 15:59 UTC (currently mapped to V4-Flash). |
| Try in UI | chat.deepseek.com — Expert Mode / Instant Mode per the post. |
| Dimension | DeepSeek-V4-Pro | DeepSeek-V4-Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Reported scale | 1.6T total params, 49B active | 284B total, 13B active |
| Positioning | Flagship reasoning + agentic coding | Fast, cost-effective, strong on simple agent work |
| Reasoning | DeepSeek claims open-model SOTA on agentic coding benchmarks and strong Math/STEM/Coding vs other open models | DeepSeek states reasoning near Pro, on par with Pro for simple agent tasks |
GEO note: When you summarize leaderboard tables, link the PDF report or Hugging Face cards instead of copying every number—citation-friendly pages get cited more often in generative answers.
The post highlights token-wise compression plus DSA (DeepSeek Sparse Attention) as structural contributions, and frames them as improving long-context efficiency (compute and memory). For engineering detail, start with the tech report and model cards on Hugging Face rather than second-hand summaries.
If you are new to why context length matters for agents, our LLM context window guide walks through attention cost, KV cache, and product trade-offs—useful background when a vendor moves the default to 1M tokens.
DeepSeek states V4 is integrated with Claude Code, OpenClaw, and OpenCode, and that it already powers in-house agentic coding at DeepSeek. For portable agent instructions (skills, MCP, and progressive disclosure), see what are agent skills? on explainx.ai—skills are complementary to whichever base model you route through your host.
model strings (deepseek-chat, deepseek-reasoner, older aliases).deepseek-v4-pro or deepseek-v4-flash per latency and budget.deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner will become inaccessible after that moment.Minimal pattern (illustrative only) — replace with your real client and base URL from DeepSeek’s Quick Start:
{
"model": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Ping: confirm V4 routing." }]
}
DeepSeek closes the post with a reminder to trust official channels for news—reasonable advice when frontier releases generate noisy third-party commentary.
Parameter counts, benchmark rankings, and retirement dates are quoted from DeepSeek’s April 24, 2026 API news page; verify against live docs before production cutovers.