China’s AI startup is back a year after it stirred up the AI industry with ‘world-leading’ processing power at a fraction of the cost of other models.
The Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has unveiled a preview of its new large language model, V4, as the global AI race makes pace.
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DeepSeek became one of the most closely watched AI companies last year after releasing models in January 2025 that appeared to deliver strong performance at lower cost than many US rivals.
The Hangzhou-based startup released the model as DeepSeek V4-Pro and DeepSeek V4-Flash. V4-Pro is a larger model aimed at more demanding tasks, while V4-Flash is a smaller version designed to respond faster and cost less to run.
“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-3.1-Pro," DeepSeek said.
The company said the new AI model supports a “one-million token context length,” meaning it can take in much larger prompts, such as long documents or code, before producing an answer.
In AI, context length means the amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider at one time. A larger context window lets an AI model process longer inputs and include more information in each output, according to IBM.
“Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length,” the company said in an announcement on Hugging Face, an open source AI platform.
DeepSeek also said V4 offers “world-leading long context with drastically reduced compute and memory costs”.
DeepSeek compared V4-Pro with rival models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, though Google’s Gemini-3.1-Pro scored higher in some tests.
The new model can be used with popular AI agents such as Claude Code, OpenClaw and OpenCode, allowing developers to use the model for software tasks outside DeepSeek’s own chatbot.
Known for its more open approach than its rivals with closed AI models, DeepSeek has also made V4 available for download, tested and adapted freely on Hugging Face.
The Chinese startup gained attention in late 2024 with its open source V3 model, which surprised the AI industry with strong performance at a lower cost and using less powerful chips than many US rivals, including OpenAI and Google.
The global AI race
The company caught global attention in January 2025 when it released R1, an AI reasoning model t that the company claimed was cheaper and performed just as well as OpenAI's rival ChatGPT’s large language models.
However, some countries banned government agencies last year from using DeepSeek, including Italy, the United States, and South Korea, citing national security concerns.
Germany also banned DeepSeek in Apple and Google app stores in 2025, citing illegal transfer of user data to China.
The release of V4 comes a day after the US AI giant OpenAI also launched its latest AI model, GPT-5.5, which it called its “smartest and most intuitive” yet.
The release also comes a day after the White House accused China of stealing American AI labs’ IP on an industrial scale using thousands of proxy accounts.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google warned this year that Chinese AI firms, including DeepSeek, were conducting model extraction attacks (MEA), otherwise known as “distillation”.
The method feeds the larger model thousands of questions, collects its answers, and uses those responses to teach a new, smaller model to think in the same way.
