• Latest version ‘features an ultra-long context of one million words’
• ‘Optimised’ for popular products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy
• Adapted for Huawei chip, expert says it delivers similar performance on Nvidia
• Beijing calls US accusations of technology theft ‘baseless’

BEIJING: Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model with “drastically reduced” costs on Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.

The new version, DeepSeek-V4, “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “world-leading… with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs” in a separate announcement on X.

The model’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “[achieves] leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”, the WeChat statement said.

A “preview version” of the open source model is now available, the company said.

Experts say V4’s release marks an “inflection point” in terms of hardware and cost.

“This addresses the long-standing issues of slower performance and higher costs associated with long context lengths, marking a genuine inflection point for the industry,” Zhang Yi, the founder of tech research firm iiMedia, told AFP.

The new V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being “a more efficient and economical choice” because it has smaller parameters.

‘Sputnik moment’

V4-Pro has also been “optimised” for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode, and CodeBuddy, the DeepSeek statement said.

“In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, [Google’s] Gemini-Pro-3.1,” the statement added.

Last year’s so-called “DeepSeek shock” sparked a sell-off of AI-related shares and a reckoning on business strategy in what was also described as a “Sputnik moment” for the industry.

Adapted for Huawei chips

A key change from earlier DeepSeek releases is that V4 was adapted for Huawei’s most advanced Ascend AI chips.

Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek had not shared its new model with US chipmakers for performance tuning, instead granting early access to domestic companies such as Huawei, despite previously working closely with Nvidia’s technical staff.

“Through close technical collaboration ... the entire Ascend supernode product line now supports the DeepSeek-V4 series models,” Huawei said.

DeepSeek’s earlier V3 and R1 models were trained on Nvidia chips. The company did not say whether the same applied to V4.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, said the partnership shows DeepSeek models can deliver similar performance on both Huawei and Nvidia hardware.

Beijing refutes claim

Meanwhile, the White House has accused Chinese firms of vying to “steal” American technology, ahead of an expected summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.

“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” Trump’s science and technology chief advisor Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.

“The US claims are entirely baseless,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news conference in Beijing.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2026