DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (flexai)

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is an open-weights release from DeepSeek that appeared in October 2026, tracked by Artificial Analysis both as a standalone release entry and as a model page covering its higher-compute "max" variant. It sits in the Flash tier of the DeepSeek line, which points to a design intent of fast, economical inference rather than maximum capability, and it accepts both text and image input while producing text output. That combination suits everyday chat assistants, document and image understanding pipelines, and lightweight agent steps where a compact open-weight model is preferred over a hosted frontier model.

Independent evaluation places the model at the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scale, rated four out of four units on intelligence with an index score of 33, though its measured speed is more modest: roughly 45.5 seconds to a first answer token and about 170 tokens per second of output. Artificial Analysis also finds it more verbose than most peers, which matters for cost- and latency-sensitive deployments. For open-weight users, the practical takeaway is a strong capability-to-weight ratio backed by several independent inference providers, with the tradeoff being slower per-task completion and heavier token use than leaner alternatives.