DeepSeek V4 continues DeepSeek's disruption of the frontier market — open-weight releases with reasoning performance rivaling closed models at a fraction of the cost.
Why developers choose V4
API at approximately $1/$4 per million tokens. Run locally via Ollama for air-gapped environments. Strong math, coding, and chain-of-thought without vendor lock-in.
Trade-offs
Text-first — less native multimodal polish than ChatGPT 5.6 or Gemini 3.5. Lighter refusal tuning may require output filtering for consumer apps. 128K context — fine for most code tasks, not for million-token dumps.
Deployment paths
DeepSeek API, self-host with vLLM/SGLang, or Ollama pull for local dev. Popular in cost-sensitive startups and research labs.
Stack recommendation
DeepSeek V4 for bulk inference; Claude Fable 5 or ChatGPT 5.6 for hardest 10% of tasks. Read DeepSeek vs ChatGPT.
