DeepSeek V4 Flash vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (95 vs 35 on our capability index).
- •o1 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (60 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is open-weights (free to self-host); o1 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash has a 1M tokens context window vs 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M tokens | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-04 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V4 Flash | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning (vs V4 Pro) | Closely approaches V4 Pro | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if...
- →You want most of V4 Pro's capability at a lower price and higher throughput
- →You need long context but on a tighter compute or cost budget
- →You are serving high request volumes where per-token cost dominates
- →You want an open model small enough to self-host on modest multi-GPU setups
Choose o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks