Chinese AI company DeepSeek this week previewed its latest LLM models, the eponymously named DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash.
When V3 launched last year, many people wondered whether American-made models could compete with DeepSeek, which built its own data centers to train its models.
V4 isnβt quite prompting the same existential questions. According to DeepSeek, itβs beating other models at reasoning and is comparable on coding, but is behind on knowledge tests and can only handle text, instead of images, audio, and video.
Moreover, itβs not like those other companies are standing still. This same week, we saw notable launches like:
- OpenAI pumped out GPT-5.5 and ChatGPT Images 2.0, an updated image model with a built-in reasoning step which promises better layouts and results that look more like what youβre asking for.
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Anthropic shipped Claude Desktop Buddy, a tiny physical companion for Claude that sits on your desk, connects to the desktop app, and reacts to whatβs going on so you can see activity without staring at a screen the whole time.
Still, not everything needs to be the best to compete. DeepSeek does exceptionally well on price and context. Itβs cheaper than GPT, Gemini or Claude, and the models support context windows larger than 1 million tokens β you can give it a ton of data to play with.