Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd. has released an updated version of its V4.1-Flash model that it says completes tasks faster.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 arrives a little over five weeks after the company launched the original V4.1-Flash as the smallest model in a new architecture family. Its model card on Hugging Face calls the release a “minor update” that “reduces task execution time and output length.” DeepSeek did not say by how much.

Price was the selling point in September, with off-peak application programming interface rates starting at 15 cents per million uncached input tokens. After that release, Bloomberg reported Saturday, shares of Chinese rivals MiniMax Group Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell in Hong Kong.

The update resolved 77% of tasks on the DeepSWE v1.1 software engineering test in DeepSeek’s own testing, up from 74.2% for the September version. Anthropic PBC’s Claude Opus 5 sits at 74% in the same table. Seven of the 11 benchmarks DeepSeek published still go to Anthropic’s model, and the margin on Humanity’s Last Exam runs to almost 14 points.

DeepSeek said it tuned the update for agent software, including its DeepSeek Harness tool and two Tencent Holdings Ltd. products, the CodeBuddy coding assistant and WorkBuddy, a desktop agent for office work. WorkBuddy has offered V4.1-Flash since DeepSeek released the model on Sept. 10.

Agent builders got a second release from DeepSeek. The company opened its in-house search engine to outside developers through a Search API that returns up to 50 ranked web results per query. A separate Fetch API converts a single web page to Markdown. Both cost 75 cents per 1,000 successful requests, and calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI Group PBC’s Codex are free until Nov. 1.

The releases follow a nearly five-hour API outage on Oct. 15 that Yicai Global counted among DeepSeek’s worst this year. The company apologized afterward, and users received credits pegged to what they had spent the week before. DeepSeek also said it would remove single points of dependency in its systems to keep the failure from recurring. Some experts quoted by Bloomberg blamed a shortage of computing capacity.

The updated model is live now in DeepSeek’s web and mobile apps. API customers reach it through the existing deepseek-flash model ID at unchanged prices, with the change log recommending Harness version 0.2.1-rc.1 or later. The weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT license.

Image: DeepSeek