At its highest capacity, DeepSeek’s V4 ‘redefines the state-of-the-art for open models’, according to the company.

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek has launched its long-awaited V4 large language model (LLM) in preview, as speculation around a possible first funding round swirls.

The latest open-source launch comes more than a year after the start-up released R1, whose cost effectiveness and performance sent Silicon Valley leaders in a flurry, igniting accusations of theft. R1 was trained using lower-capacity Nvidia chips.

The V4 series comes in two versions, a ‘Pro’ version with 49bn activated parameters and a ‘Flash’ version with 13bn activated parameters, both supporting a context length of 1m tokens.

At its maximum capacity, the V4-Pro-Max mode “redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks”, DeepSeek said.

This mode has “significantly closed the gap” with Google’s Gemini 3.1-Pro, the leading model in knowledge-based evaluations, according to the company, while outpacing OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.0-Pro on “standard reasoning benchmarks”.

In agentic tasks, DeepSeek’s V4-Pro-Max is on par with leading open-source models, such as Kimi-K2.6 and GLM-5.1, but slightly worse than frontier closed models, it noted.

Its internal evaluations revealed that the Pro-Max version outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the level of Opus 4.5. Huawei has said that its Ascend supernode ​based on Ascend ⁠950 ​AI chips would be supporting V4’s versions.

OpenAI made fresh allegations against DeepSeek as recent as February, calling the company’s distillation techniques a part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”.

Meanwhile, the US administration yesterday (23 April) said it will work closely with AI companies to fight “industrial-scale campaigns” by foreign actors attempting to steal its technology.

Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba are reportedly in talks to join the DeepSeek’s first funding round. A source told Bloomberg that the benchmark for a valuation would be around $40bn. The publication further reported that Tencent has proposed a 20pc stake in the company.

DeepSeek’s Chinese contemporaries have made their own AI model launches in the months past, wishing to get ahead of V4, which was hyped to be the company’s most important launch since R1, and V3 in late 2024.

Latest launches include Alibaba’s Qwen3.5; ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0; Zhipu’s GLM-5, trained entirely using Chinese chips; MiniMax, which released M2.5; and the Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI, which came out with Kimi K2.5.

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