DeepSeek's V4 Flash Sparks AI Price War as OpenAI Slashes Costs by 80%

DeepSeek dropped V4 Flash this week, a coding-focused AI model that charges pennies for code while matching the performance of systems costing many times more. On Arena.ai's crowdsourced leaderboard for front-end coding, V4 Flash debuted ahead of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 — arguably the industry's most capable coding model. The model scored 82.7 on Terminal Bench 2.1 and 54.4 on DeepSWE, focusing on autonomous agent tasks. DeepSeek put the formal...