Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. I'm working in the agent industry and my god are we excited on new versions of Chinese flash models. The direct competition is Gemini Flash, and these models are much better on agentic tasks with fraction of the task price compared to Gemini. Things like oh here's a set of simple instructions for you to follow, call these tools, return this report. 20-30% of the price per task. And especially Deepseek Flash produces better quality than Gemini does.

Where Gemini still wins is non-text input what Deepseek cannot do, yet, and Deepseek Flash has this thing of cheaper models where a failing tool call can derail your agent to a retry loop if you're not careful on instructions in the error message.

If they fix and make the tool calls to work better in non-optimal situations, it's much easier to switch from Gemini without a few weeks of evals and bugfixing.

Which versions of flash and at what thinking levels? Which chinese flash models and at what thinking levels? What tasks? What completion rates? How was quality evaluated?

- Which versions: 3.6 vs 3.7 vs. 3.8 for Gemini Flash, and v4 0731 for Deepseek v4 Flash, and GLM 5.3 Flash

- Medium for Gemini, high for Deepseek.

- Things like find information, then understand something about it, then send a slack message or email etc.

- Completion rates somewhere in 80-90%, Deepseek a bit better than Gemini

- Quality evaluated by Fable 5.1 and Astra 6.0 acting as a rubric judge.

Gemini quality would probably be better with high thinking level, but that would be 40% more expensive. And Deepseek is already third the price of Gemini.

Thanks... I have been trying to figure out some things. Been doing my own evals. Flash 3.8 does burn a lot more tokens on high. Interesting how smart and not smart it is. For personal use almost impossible to justify the cost of 3.8 Flash cost.

Deepseek also burns a lot of tokens, its output on high is 2x of Gemini on medium. But it's dirt-cheap so it still can be 60-70% cheaper.

From the large models Kimi K3 is definitely the one burning the smallest amount of tokens. Even if you pay for the fast version in Fireworks it's third of the price of Opus 5 for the same task.

All this really needs evals, the token prices tell nothing.

I am surprised at how well DSv4 flash does in the real world vs many benchmarks. You look at Flash 3.8 and it supposedly beats opus 5 and deepseek is far below.. but they were measuring efficiency, whatever that is… Something doesn’t add up for me on the published benches

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