The latest generation of DeepSeek's open-weight model family — a two-tier lineup (V4-Pro and V4-Flash) of mixture-of-experts language models with a 1M-token context, MIT-licensed weights, and low per-token API pricing.
Last verified · 2026-10-23 · by Moe Ameen
Published 2026-08-03 · Updated
Short answer
DeepSeek V4 is DeepSeek's open-weight model family: V4-Pro (1.6 trillion parameters, 49 billion active) and V4-Flash (284 billion, 13 billion active). Both have a 1-million-token context and MIT-licensed weights. On DeepSeek's API, V4-Pro costs $0.66 per million input tokens off-peak. V4 writes, reasons, and codes but makes no images or video.
Key takeaways
DeepSeek V4 is the fourth-generation model family from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab. It shipped as two mixture-of-experts language models: V4-Pro, the flagship, with roughly 1.6 trillion total parameters and about 49 billion active per token, and V4-Flash, the fast, cheap tier, with about 284 billion total parameters and roughly 13 billion active.
Both share a 1-million-token context window, and both are released as open weights under the MIT license on Hugging Face, so you can call the hosted API or self-host. The V4 line first shipped on April 24, 2026, and DeepSeek has since released updated V4-Flash (July 31) and V4-Pro (August 13) builds.
It is a text-and-reasoning family, not a multimodal one — it writes, analyzes, reasons, and codes, but it does not generate images, video, or audio, and it publishes nothing. Each model runs in a fast non-thinking mode for everyday drafting and in thinking modes (High and Max) for hard problems. DeepSeek's model card benchmarks V4-Pro against Opus-4.6 Max and GPT-5.4 xHigh and reports 80.6 on SWE-bench Verified for V4-Pro-Max.
Two efficiency choices explain the low cost. The architecture uses Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to keep long-context inference efficient, and the mixture-of-experts design activates only a fraction of the parameters per token. On DeepSeek's first-party API today, the Flash tier (now served as deepseek-flash, the V4.1-Flash build) costs $0.15 per million input tokens (cache miss) and $0.60 per million output at off-peak rates, and V4-Pro costs $0.66 and $1.98. Peak-hour rates are double, and cached input is far cheaper on both.
The honest framing for a creator: V4 is a genuinely strong, unusually cheap writing-and-reasoning brain, and the open weights make private, high-volume drafting realistic. But a brain that stops at text is the upstream half of a content workflow. It drafts the script; it does not become the video, the carousel, or the scheduled calendar.
The most useful way to think about DeepSeek V4 in a content operation is as the strategist and the writer's room, not the studio. V4-Pro's thinking mode plus the 1M-token context is unusually good at the messy front of a pipeline: pour in a quarter of podcast transcripts, a course, or a stack of research, and it reasons over the whole pile to pull the angles, structure a content calendar, and draft the actual scripts and outlines — cheaply, or entirely privately if you self-host the open weights. V4-Flash then batches out the volume of variations. What none of that produces is a single finished, publishable asset. That is where Kompozy takes over.
Kompozy is a full AI content generation and multi-platform publishing engine, and it is the studio that turns V4's plans and scripts into media. Hand a DeepSeek-drafted script to Kompozy and it renders a Persona Shorts avatar video reading it, a brand-exact Carousel, Quote Graphics of the sharpest lines, Photo Posts, a formatted Blog Article, and an Email Newsletter — all held to your Persona Brief so the voice DeepSeek drafted stays consistent across every format. Then Autopilot and a per-post review pipeline reframe each asset to 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 and schedule and publish across nine destinations — the eight primary social platforms plus blog and email. One note worth stating plainly: Kompozy's own copy generation runs on Claude and OpenAI models, so DeepSeek V4 is your upstream drafting-and-planning choice, and Kompozy is the production-and-distribution engine that ships what it wrote.
A real AI avatar video rendered in the Kompozy workspace. We did not make it about DeepSeek V4. It is here so you can see what the format looks like when it comes out finished.
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DeepSeek V4 is the fourth-generation open-weight model family from the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek. It ships as two mixture-of-experts language models — V4-Pro (roughly 1.6 trillion total / 49 billion active parameters) and V4-Flash (about 284 billion / 13 billion active) — both with a 1-million-token context window and MIT-licensed weights. It first shipped on April 24, 2026, with updated V4-Flash (July 31) and V4-Pro (August 13) builds since.
On DeepSeek's first-party API, the Flash tier (deepseek-flash) costs $0.15 per million input tokens (cache miss) and $0.60 per million output at off-peak rates, and V4-Pro costs $0.66 and $1.98. Peak-hour rates are double, and cached input is far cheaper on both. Because the weights are open under the MIT license, you can also self-host to avoid per-token fees.
V4-Pro is the higher-capability flagship (roughly 1.6T total / 49B active parameters) for the hardest reasoning and coding; V4-Flash is smaller and faster (about 284B / 13B active) for cheap, high-volume drafting. Both share the 1M-token context and the V4 architecture, and both run in thinking and non-thinking modes.
No. DeepSeek V4 is a text-and-reasoning family — it writes, summarizes, reasons, and codes, but it produces no images, video, or audio and publishes nothing. To turn its scripts and drafts into finished visual posts and distribute them, pair it with a content engine like Kompozy.
Draft the script or plan in DeepSeek V4, then bring it into Kompozy to generate carousels, persona/avatar video, quote cards, and images, rewrite it in your brand voice via the Persona Brief, and schedule and publish across nine destinations — the eight social platforms plus blog and email.
We checked every figure and product claim on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23, and removed or corrected anything they did not support. API prices were updated to the rates DeepSeek lists today. Kompozy plan and platform details come from kompozy.io/pricing and kompozy.io.
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