Top 5 · 2026-04-26 · source-backed
DeepSeek V4 Drops: MIT-Licensed Frontier Model at 1/6th the Cost, Running on Chinese Chips
Story
DeepSeek released V4 on April 24 and the numbers demand attention. V4-Pro is 1.6 trillion parameters total with 49 billion active, MIT-licensed, native 1M-token context. It scores 80.6% on SWE-bench Verified, putting it within 0.2 points of Claude Opus 4.6. On Terminal-Bench 2.0 it actually leads Claude: 67.9% vs 65.4%. LiveCodeBench: 93.5% vs 88.8%.
V4-Flash is the more interesting play for production use. 284B total parameters, 13B active, priced at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens. That's the cheapest model in its performance tier by a wide margin. LMSYS benchmarked throughput at 199 tokens/sec on B200 and 266 tokens/sec on H200, with throughput dropping only 10% from 4K to 900K context tokens. That's a remarkably flat scaling curve.
The architecture is genuinely novel. Hybrid Attention combining Compressed Sparse Attention and Heavily Compressed Attention cuts inference FLOPs to 27% and KV cache to 10% compared to V3.2 at 1M context. Community analysis on r/LocalLLaMA shows KV cache dropping from 83.9 GiB to 9.62 GiB at 1M tokens. That's a 10x reduction, and it's what makes the pricing possible.
Then there's the chip story. Fortune reports Huawei confirmed V4 runs on Ascend 950 supernodes. First trillion-parameter MoE deployed without any NVIDIA hardware. DeepSeek rewrote their stack from CUDA to Huawei's CANN framework, with Cambricon and Moore Threads chips also supported. US export controls were supposed to prevent exactly this. They didn't.
What should you do? If you're running any batch processing, RAG pipelines, or high-volume agent workflows, V4-Flash deserves a serious evaluation this week. At $0.14/M input tokens versus $3/M for Claude Sonnet or $15/M for Opus, the cost difference funds a lot of quality-checking infrastructure. I'm not saying it replaces Opus for complex reasoning. I'm saying for 70% of the token volume in most production systems, it might be good enough at 1/100th the price. That's worth testing.
Related stories
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Shared entities / Same source / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
DeepSeek V4 Preview Drops: 1.6T Parameters, 1M Context, Apache 2.0, and a 35x Price Gap That Should Make Every Builder Rethink Their Inference Budget
Both cover April, Bench, Community, DeepSeek; cite the same source (V4-Pro); overlapping topics (attention, context, deepseek, parameter).
Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
A 27B Model Just Matched the 400B One. It Fits on Your Laptop.
Both cover April, Claude Opus, LocalLLaMA, MoE; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com, simonwillison.net); overlapping topics (claude, cost, model, token).
GPT-5.5 Is Here. It's Fast, It's Expensive, and It Changes How You Prompt.
Both cover April, Bench, Claude Opus, Flash; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net); overlapping topics (cost, model, opus, token).
Shared entities / Shared topic / What happened next
GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Both cover Bench, CLAUDE, Claude Opus, DeepSeek; overlapping topics (claude, deepseek, model); picks up the Bench thread on 2026-07-08.
Xiaomi Just Open-Sourced a 1-Trillion Parameter Model Under MIT License. It Built a Compiler in 4 Hours.
Both cover April, Claude Opus, DeepSeek, LocalLLaMA; overlapping topics (context, cost, model, parameter, token); picks up the April thread on 2026-05-01.
Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
An Open-Source Model Just Beat GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6 on the Hardest Coding Benchmark
Both cover Claude Opus, DeepSeek, MIT, MoE; overlapping topics (active, model, opus, parameter); earlier Claude Opus coverage from 2026-04-20.
Shared entities / Shared topic / What happened next / Tension
DeepSeek V4 ships open-weight, 1M context, and cheap enough to break your build-vs-buy math
Both cover DeepSeek, Flash, MIT, SWE; overlapping topics (active, context, cost, deepseek, model); picks up the DeepSeek thread on 2026-06-15.
Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
GLM-5: 744B Open-Source, Free on NVIDIA NIM
Both cover Bench, MIT, MoE, Opus; overlapping topics (chip, claude, context, model); earlier Bench coverage from 2026-03-04.
Source trail
Entities
Provenance
- Canonical issue
- Ramsay Research Agent — April 26, 2026
- AI generated
- no
- Story unit
- 2026-04-26-deepseek-v4-drops-mit-licensed-frontier-model-at-1-6th-the-cost-running-on-chinese-chips
- Labels
- source-backed, canonical briefing excerpt