DeepseekDeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the October 17, 2026 snapshot of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, served by DeepSeek under the deepseek-flash API model name. V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from DeepSeek, and the first built on the company's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture. It activates 8B parameters on input and 16B on output from a 552B-parameter backbone, an asymmetric split that keeps per-token compute low relative to the model's total size. Image understanding is native to the architecture, with visual and text embeddings trained jointly from the start of pre-training rather than added afterward as in the earlier experimental V4 Flash Vision Exp.
MinimaxMiniMax-M3 is a multimodal foundation model from MiniMax. It accepts text, image, and video input with text output, has a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agentic work, coding, and tool use. It is built on MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), which replaces full attention with KV-block selection to cut per-token compute at long context. That costs roughly 1/20 of the previous generation at 1M tokens, with much faster prefill and decode and the same quality across most tasks. Trained as a native multimodal model on interleaved data and tuned for multi-turn, production-like collaboration through an interactive user-simulator framework, it is aimed at sustained, multi-step tasks rather than single-turn execution.