Chinese startup DeepSea has unveiled its new model, ‘DeepSea-V4’, featuring high-capacity artificial intelligence at a low cost. The DeepSea-V4 offers an ultra-long context capability of up to one million words and is available in two versions: ‘V4-Pro’ and ‘V4-Flash’.
Making global waves by developing high-performance AI at a low cost, DeepSea officially launched the ‘DeepSea-V4′ on Friday. Having disrupted the American companies’ monopoly early in 2025, the startup claims that this new version significantly reduces production and computing costs.
The model is offered in two variants: V4-Pro and V4-Flash. According to the company, DeepSea-V4 features an ‘ultra-long context’ capacity of up to one million words, enabling it to process complex tasks by handling large amounts of information simultaneously. The V4-Pro version contains 1.6 trillion parameters, while the cost-effective and faster V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters.
On the ‘World Knowledge Benchmarks’, this model is said to compete strongly with Google’s ‘Gemini-Pro-3.1’, outperforming other open-source models. Industry analysts view this as a benchmark move that could democratize AI capabilities previously limited to expensive research laboratories, making them accessible to businesses and the general public.
Since DeepSea has kept its models open source, usage is rapidly increasing across Chinese municipalities, healthcare institutions, and the financial sector. However, the company’s success has also raised security and privacy concerns. The White House has accused Chinese firms of orchestrating a large-scale campaign to ‘steal’ American AI technologies. Michael Kratsios, former science and technology advisor under the Trump administration, has claimed there is evidence that Chinese institutions have harvested data from US AI models through ‘distillation’ techniques. Additionally, DeepSea’s chatbot has faced criticism for censoring responses on sensitive political topics such as Tiananmen Square. Ahead of the upcoming summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing next month, AI competition is further heightening tensions between the two countries.
