Hilarious sentence: "DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, delivering substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks." (emphasis mine)

Kinda shows their team is more engineers than marketers.

Hoping it's minor relative to what's coming

It's not really contradictory, minor changes can have major effects.

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

It's about playing to two different audiences.

The CCP requires extensive certification for new major releases, to make sure a model doesn't do anything they don't want it to.

To get around this, Chinese labs only bump versions when they have to and usually claim it's a minor update.

Then on the other side, they're obviously trying to market to the tech crowd...

I'm at 1 trying to get to 10. I move to 2. Minor update. 100% improvement towards goal.

These are not mutually exclusive.

It's a bit refreshing to read updates from an AI lab without bullshit doomerism and overwhelming sense of self-importance from shit like OpenAI and Claude.

Also, DS is an excellent model.

That is how exponential functions work. Improve every aspect of a system with 1% and you may get easily 50% more performance.