DeepSeek unveils next-gen AI model as Huawei vows ‘full support’ with new chips
The company says its cost-efficient new V4 model is competitive with top closed-source models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind
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.
“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.