Chinese startup says DeepSeek-V4-Pro beats all rival open models for maths and coding. Published On 24 Apr 202624 Apr 2026China’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.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listLike 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. Advertisement Some tech analysts challenged DeepSeek’s account of working with such scant resources, arguing that the startup most likely had access to g …
