DeepSeek 4.1 Flash: The Frontier Model That Costs Almost Nothing
Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
After a month of heavy use across a dozen projects, I can't tell DeepSeek 4.1 Flash apart from Opus. It's orders of magnitude cheaper, handles the same workloads, and its 437x KV cache reduction keeps all-day sessions under a dollar. The industry should be panicking, but it's too busy paying top dollar for the 'best' intelligence to notice.
I don't care that there is no 4.1 'Pro'. I treat this like a frontier model because it behaves like one.