People have been raving since forever about Deepseek, but if one looks at the CoT, it's evident that it's way way stupider than frontier models (there's a reason why it's cheap). It's laughable to compare Deepseek 4.1 with Opus 5.5.

I've benchmarked, rigorously, deepseek-v4-flash for programming and personal use, and it is definitely less smart than Qwen3.8-flash-next (which in turn, is not terribly smart).

Local models are also really slow, unless one spends insane amounts of money.

Having said that, Qwen3.8-flash-next is an impressive evolution; it reaches the small versions of the frontier models (like Sonnet) - but again, it's massively slower and not 100% reliable (including: stability).

The argument that most people are making isn't that dsv4.1f is better than frontier, but that it's good enough for most tasks, faster, and way cheaper.

> if one looks at the CoT, it's evident that it's way way stupider than frontier models

Frontier models don't show the full CoT

The COT isn't an end all be all. Research has shown that the COT isn't necessarily what the model is actually thinking.