China’s DeepSeek Launches Smaller, Faster AI Model

DeepSeek released a new smaller model on Thursday that it says can outperform some flagship systems while cutting inference costs, as Chinese AI developers increasingly compete on both model capability and price.

The new DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a 552-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with native multimodal visual understanding. DeepSeek said the model uses a new architecture designed to deliver higher performance, faster inference, higher throughput and easier scaling to larger models.