DeepSeek unveils AI model that approaches Anthropic’s performance at a fraction of the cost

DeepSeek just dropped what might be the most cost-efficient frontier AI model on the market. The Chinese research lab’s new V4-Flash can process both text and images, performs competitively with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on reasoning and coding benchmarks, and does it all for roughly $0.28 per output. Anthropic charges somewhere in the $25 to $30 range for comparable work. What DeepSeek actually built The company released preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Pro and V4-Flash on April 24, 2026, the latest entries in its V4 model family. The headline feature is multimodal capability, meaning these models can interpret images alongside text prompts. The technical architecture behind V4-Flash is where things get interesting. The model uses approximately 90 KV cache entries to process images, compared to roughly 870 for Claude models. KV cache is essentially the model’s working memory during inference. Fewer entries means less computational overhead, which translates directly into lower costs and faster processing. DeepSeek’s models also support long-context handling of up to 1 million tokens. The models are compatible with both OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, making them relatively straightfor...