In a significant development for the global AI landscape, China-based startup DeepSeek has introduced preview versions of its latest chatbot models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The launch comes 1 year after its earlier model disrupted the global tech ecosystem.
The new models are designed to compete directly with leading AI systems from companies like OpenAI and Google. Like its earlier offerings, DeepSeek continues to follow an open-source approach, allowing developers to freely use and modify the code.
According to the company, DeepSeek-V4-Pro outperforms all rival open models in maths and coding tasks and is second only to Gemini 3.1-Pro in world knowledge. It stated that the model falls only “marginally short” of advanced systems like GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro, indicating a gap of around 3 to 6 months behind top-tier models.
The V4-Flash version delivers similar reasoning capabilities but focuses on faster response times and cost efficiency.
DeepSeek first gained global attention with the launch of DeepSeek-R1 in January last year. The model showed capabilities comparable to ChatGPT and Gemini. At the time, investor Marc Andreessen described it as “AI’s Sputnik moment”. The company claimed it built the model with less than $6 million in computing costs, though some analysts questioned this figure.
The rise of DeepSeek also triggered regulatory concerns. Several countries, including the US, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark, and Italy, imposed bans or restrictions on DeepSeek-R1 citing data security and censorship risks.
AI is now a key battleground between the US and China. While the US still leads in advanced models and high-impact patents, China has rapidly narrowed the gap. According to the Stanford AI Index 2026, China leads in publication volume, citations, patent output, and industrial robot installations.
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