DeepSeek has finally released its much-anticipated next-generation foundational artificial intelligence model, the open-source V4, which it said was competitive with leading US closed-source models from the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
The Hangzhou-based AI start-up released two versions of the model on Friday, with the V4-pro model boasting 1.6 trillion parameters, making it the company’s biggest-ever model by that metric, while the smaller V4-flash model has 284 billion parameters. A higher parameter count generally correlates with greater capabilities for a model, while also increasing the computational demands of training and serving it.
Both models have a context window of 1 million tokens, a critical feature that determines the amount of information an AI system is able to process, which DeepSeek said was achieved with “world-leading” cost efficiency. DeepSeek’s previous flagship model had a context window of 128,000 tokens.
Soon after DeepSeek’s release, Huawei announced “full support” from its range of Ascend chips, along with its supernode systems, to serve V4 models for model inference. The Shenzhen-based tech giant is set to reveal more details about the collaboration in a live stream on Friday afternoon. AI chipmaker Cambricon Technologies also moved quickly to announce compatibility with DeepSeek’s new models.
“The release of V4 explicitly mentions compatibility with domestic chips,” said analysts from Huatai Securities in a note to clients. “We can look forward to a significant improvement in the capabilities of domestic graphics cards and their widespread adoption this year.”
While the parameter size of V4-pro makes it prohibitively large to be run locally on consumer-grade hardware, the extended technical report outlining V4’s model architecture and training techniques is likely to be beneficial for global AI developers.
The V4-flash model is also one of the cheapest cutting-edge models available on the market, with token pricing identical to DeepSeek’s V2 model released in June 2024.
