China's DeepSeek Releases New AI Models with 'World-Class' Reasoning

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek announced its latest artificial intelligence models on Friday, about a year after its previous version became the top-rated free app on Apple's App Store in the United States.

The new V4 models come in two versions: "Pro" for maximum performance and "Flash" for faster responses at lower cost. Both can process up to one million tokens of context, which means they can remember much longer conversations and documents than previous versions.

DeepSeek says the V4 has the best coding abilities among open-source AI models. The models can also perform complex tasks automatically without human guidance - what experts call "agentic" capabilities.

The Flash version offers similar reasoning power to the Pro model but responds faster and costs less to run. DeepSeek promotes this as "cost-effective" AI that competes with expensive services from American companies.

DeepSeek made waves last year when it showed that Chinese companies could build AI models that rival those from Silicon Valley giants like OpenAI and Google, often at much lower cost.