Comment by pmxi
15 hours ago
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)
15 hours ago
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.
But with that version number, it's not a "minor" update! It's a patchlevel update! -Engineer
An old-school (pre-LLMs?) engineer would recognize that DeepSeek is in no way doing semver, so your major/minor/patch glossary might not apply here at all :)
Strictly speaking, it just shows they aren't marketers. Bad copy doesn't tell us anything about their engineering skill.
It's not a bad copy, or at least that's not what the person you responded to is insinuating.
Deepseep-v4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update. A major update is something like Deepseek-v5-Flash.
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Strictly speaking, it's the substantial improvements that tell us about their engineering skill.
Strictly speaking, they didn't say anything about their engineering skill
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To me this implies they continued the training run for 4.1 and it improved. A 4.2 would imply they changed something about how it’s trained/how inference works, and a 5.0 would be a major update (who knows what would have changed).
This is just my headcanon though.
It's not really contradictory, minor changes can have major effects.
So they meant a "small" update - "conservative", "inexpensive"...
An example when using a less frequent term actually reduces specificity.
Changing TREE(2) to TREE(3) is a small change on the input, but a... lets just call it big... change in the output.
No, they used minor correctly.
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That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
Hoping it's minor relative to what's coming
Minor updates can provide substantial improvements sometimes, it really depends on the specifics.
Remember when we were dumbfounded why our service is slow despite having implemented quite robust caching mechanism. Turns out simply the flag that enables it was hardcoded to false. So it was minor update (changed flag to true), but provided substantial speed up.
They changed how it works substantially. I think it should be 4.2.
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.
Quiet confidence backed by provenance :).
I'm at 1 trying to get to 10. I move to 2. Minor update. 100% improvement towards goal.
These are not mutually exclusive.
That is how exponential functions work. Improve every aspect of a system with 1% and you may get easily 50% more performance.
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...
Source?
Everything in China is strictly regulated but loosely enforced. Just take that as a grain of salt
Drum Tower podcast (from the Economist, paywalled) about Chinese AI.
Would highly recommend it, it's IMO the only serious Western reporting about China.
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