China's DeepSeek has released its latest artificial intelligence model, V4, as part of its ongoing effort to compete with leading systems from US companies. The Hangzhou-based firm announced that its new open-source model is designed to match the performance of closed-source AI models developed by companies such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Two Versions of DeepSeek-V4
The launch includes two versions of the model: DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6 trillion parameters and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284 billion parameters. This release marks one of the company's largest developments to date and comes as competition in the global AI market continues to intensify, with companies focusing on scale, performance, and cost efficiency.
"In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, Gemini-Pro-3.1 from Google," the company stated.
Context Window and Efficiency
Both versions support a context window of 1 million tokens, which determines how much information the system can process at one time. DeepSeek said this was achieved with high cost efficiency. "Through architectural innovations, the DeepSeek-V4 series achieves a dramatic leap in computational efficiency for processing ultra-long sequences. This breakthrough enables efficient support for a context length of one million tokens, ushering in a new era of million-length contexts for next-generation large language models," the company explained.
"We believe our capability to efficiently handle ultra-long sequences unlocks the next frontier of test-time scaling, paves the way for deeper research into long-horizon tasks, and establishes a necessary foundation for exploring future paradigms like online learning," it added.
Hardware and Development Details
DeepSeek did not disclose the exact hardware used to train the V4 models. However, it said its system includes software components designed to work with both Nvidia and Huawei chips. The company noted that performance is currently limited by available computing capacity. It added that costs are expected to decrease later in the year as new hardware, including Huawei's Ascend 950PR systems, becomes available at scale.
The release comes amid ongoing restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China, particularly high-end graphics processing units from Nvidia. These restrictions have affected the development of AI models in the country.
