DeepSeek V4 hits general availability — 284B Flash runs locally, rivals GPT-5.6 Sol on coding

DeepSeek's V4 family reached general availability around July 19–20 after a limited rollout of V4 Flash and V4 Pro. Released under a permissive MIT license, it comes in two sizes: V4 Pro at 1.6 trillion parameters and V4 Flash at 284 billion. Its mixture-of-experts architecture activates only about 13 billion parameters at a time, which lets the smaller Flash model run locally on high-end hardware while still competing with cloud frontier systems — a capability XDA Developers demonstrated running the 284B model on local infrastructure. The model boasts a 1-million-token context window.

Early benchmarks reportedly place V4's performance near Anthropic's Opus models and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol on coding tasks, at a dramatically lower price point. That combination — frontier-adjacent quality, local deployability, and permissive licensing — makes V4 a core piece of the week's China open-weights surge alongside Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8. Bloomberg framed the collective moment as an inevitable 'DeepSeek 2.0.'

On the business side, DeepSeek is developing its own custom inference chip to reduce reliance on NVIDIA and Huawei, and announced plans to raise fresh capital at a $74 billion valuation ahead of an onshore IPO targeting a 2027 debut — weeks after closing a reported $7 billion Series A. Legacy API model names will retire on July 24, with migration to V4 variants.

Skeptics on r/DeepSeek debated cost claims, with one thread picking apart the 'you pay $10 and get $60' credit framing as a pricing illusion. Independent verification of the Opus/Sol-parity coding claims is still limited. Readers should watch the July 24 API migration, independent benchmark placement, and whether the custom inference chip materializes ahead of the IPO.