DeepSeek releases updated V4.1-Flash model it says completes tasks faster

What happened

has released an updated version of its V4.1-Flash model that it says completes tasks faster. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 arrives a little over five weeks after the company launched the original V4.1-Flash as the smallest model in a new architecture family.

UPDATED 18:34 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2026 AI DeepSeek releases updated V4.1-Flash model it says completes tasks faster by Duncan Riley Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co.

Its model card on Hugging Face calls the release a “minor update” that “reduces task execution time and output length.” DeepSeek did not say by how much.

Price was the selling point in September, with off-peak application programming interface rates starting at 15 cents per million uncached input tokens. After that release, Bloomberg reported , shares of Chinese rivals MiniMax Group Inc.

The update resolved 77% of tasks on the DeepSWE v1.1 software engineering test in DeepSeek’s own testing, up from 74.2% for the September version. Anthropic PBC (a company legally required to pursue a stated public benefit)’s Claude Opus 5 sits at 74% in the same table.

Seven of the 11 benchmarks (a standard test used to compare systems) DeepSeek published still go to Anthropic’s model, and the margin on Humanity’s Last Exam runs to almost 14 points. DeepSeek said it tuned the update for agent software, including its DeepSeek Harness tool and two Tencent Holdings Ltd.