China’s DeepSeek has unveiled the latest versions of its signature artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, a year after its flagship model sent shockwaves through the global tech scene.
The Chinese startup launched preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash on Friday as it touted its ability to go toe-to-toe with US rivals such as OpenAI and Google.
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Like DeepSeek’s previous chatbots, V4-Pro and V4-Flash follow an open-source model, meaning developers are free to use and modify the source code at will.
DeepSeek-V4-Pro beats all rival open models for maths and coding, and trails only Google’s Gemini 3.1-Pro, a closed model, for world knowledge, DeepSeek said in an announcement on social media.
The “pro” version’s performance falls only “marginally short” of OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro, “suggesting a developmental trajectory that trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months,” the Hangzhou-based startup said.
The “flash” model has similar reasoning abilities to the “pro” version, while offering faster response times and “highly cost-effective” usage pricing, the firm said.
The release comes after DeepSeek-R1 stunned the tech sector upon its launch in January last year with capabilities broadly comparable with those of ChatGPT and Gemini.
Marc Andreessen, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist with close ties to United States President Donald Trump, hailed the model’s release at the time as “AI’s Sputnik moment”.
The performance of the Chinese-developed model attracted particular attention as its developers claimed to have spent less than $6m on computing costs – a fraction of the multibillion-dollar budgets that are usual in Silicon Valley.
Some tech analysts challenged DeepSeek’s account of working with such scant resources, arguing that the startup most likely had access to greater funding and more advanced chips than acknowledged.
DeepSeek’s arrival on the scene prompted blowback in some countries amid concerns about data protection and Chinese government censorship.
Multiple US states, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark and Italy introduced bans or other restrictions on DeepSeek-R1 shortly after its release, citing privacy and national security concerns.
AI has emerged as a critical front in the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China.
While Silicon Valley retains a slight edge in developing the most advanced models, Chinese companies have “effectively closed” the AI performance gap with their US rivals, according to the Stanford AI Index 2026.
While the US produces more top-tier AI models and “higher-impact patents”, China leads in “publication volume, citations, patent output, and industrial robot installations,” according to the index released earlier this month.
