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.

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bitexploder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

	▲	pimeys 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		- 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.

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urieiejr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

translation

I make vaporware that doesnt do shit reliably and this chinese crap spouts plausible demos and spam calls more cheaply than the competition saaar

	▲	pimeys 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, it's much more than that. In general everybody's building agents now. You see these things that can help you to do things like adding things like OCR an appointment from a picture of a hand-written paper and add it to your calendar, search things from the internet, find that email with a PDF and add it to your local paperless instance. Building an agent like this by yourself is really easy. Now, we have Gemini's subscription, OpenAI's ChatGPT subscription and all those, 20 bucks a month right? What if you can spend that 20 bucks in tokens to do your own. And you pay 15 bucks _a year_ in tokens to run that? And you own the data, you own your code and integrations. It's really easy to do, and these flash models are _more than enough_ for simple agentic tasks.