DeepSeek Puts V4-Flash-0731 API Into Public Beta, Beating Its Own Flagship on Agent Benchmarks
DeepSeek
DeepSeek released the V4-Flash-0731 build of its API into public beta on July 31, keeping the same architecture as the V4-Flash preview but re-post-trained to surpass DeepSeek's own V4-Pro-Preview on all nine published agent and coding benchmarks, including Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE. The model natively supports the Responses API format and is compatible with Codex.
Why it matters
A cheaper 'flash' tier model now beats DeepSeek's flagship preview on agentic coding benchmarks, showing post-training alone can close much of the gap to a larger model.
Importance: 3/5
Notable release: a lower-cost tier model surpasses its own lab's flagship preview on all published agent/coding benchmarks, official + 2 independent media confirmations.
Sources
official
DeepSeek API Change Log