DeepSeek moved its V4-Flash model out of preview and into official public beta on July 31, 2026, and the upgraded version now outscores the company’s own larger, more expensive V4-Pro-Preview
DeepSeek moved its V4-Flash model out of preview and into official public beta on July 31, 2026, and the upgraded version now outscores the company’s own larger, more expensive V4-Pro-Preview model across every agent benchmark DeepSeek published. The catch: it’s the same architecture as before. DeepSeek only retrained it.
V4-Flash-0731 keeps the identical 284-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts design and 13-billion active parameters as the preview build — DeepSeek’s changelog is explicit that this is a post-training upgrade, not a new model. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, a measure of complex command-line agent work, it scored 82.7, up from 61.8 for the preview and ahead of V4-Pro-Preview’s 72.1, landing within a few points of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 at 85.0, according to a detailed benchmark breakdown. DeepSWE jumped from 7.3 to 54.4, and Cybergym rose from 38.7 to 76.7.
DeepSeek published a nine-benchmark comparison against Opus 4.8. Opus 4.8 leads on all nine, though several gaps are narrow — Agents’ Last Exam sits at 25.2 versus 25.7, essentially a rounding difference. Independent evaluator Artificial Analysis measured the pre-0731 endpoint at 61.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 in a July 27 snapshot, matching DeepSeek’s own preview figure to the decimal — solid independent confirmation of the baseline, even if the eye-catching 25.8-point jump some outlets cited compares two different benchmark versions rather than a clean before-and-after.
V4-Flash-0731 costs $0.14 per million input tokens on a cache miss (just $0.0028 on a cache hit) and $0.28 per million output tokens — pricing unchanged from the preview, and dramatically below even OpenAI’s newly discounted GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.20/$1.20. The timing is hard to ignore: DeepSeek shipped this release one day after OpenAI cut Luna’s price 80%, positioning V4-Flash-0731 as an immediate counter-move in the same price war rather than a coincidence.
As of release, the -0731 weights had not yet appeared on Hugging Face, and DeepSeek’s announced peak/off-peak pricing tiers weren’t live — meaning some details in the official changelog describe a commitment rather than a currently usable fact. Flash also supports 2,500 concurrent requests versus Pro’s 500, a fivefold headroom advantage that likely matters more to production agent fleets than any single benchmark score.
The migration cost for existing users is effectively zero: developers already calling the deepseek-v4-flash endpoint get the upgraded checkpoint automatically, under the same model name and API key, with no code changes required. DeepSeek framed this as a deliberate design choice — since the architecture didn’t change, only the post-training pass, there was no technical reason to force a version bump that would fragment the user base across old and new endpoints.
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